They say working too hard can give you a heart attack. But, if you work at U.S. Geological Survey headquarters in Reston, Va., your odds at surviving a cardiac arrest just got better.
In what could be a new trend for federal buildings, USGS has installed five automatic external defibrillators at its headquarters to help employees or visitors in the event of cardiac arrest. The portable defibrillators are devices used to resuscitate someone whose heart is fibrillating, or fluttering, by shocking the heart back to its normal rhythm.
"We have had a number of fatalities over the years in our facility; at least two have passed away in the last four years," said Dan McCord, a computer specialist and chairman of the USGS' defibrillator team.
The new defibrillator units will up the odds of survival by allowing treatment to occur within the first minute of heart failure. According to McCord, if a fibrillating heart is treated within the first 1-2 minutes, there is an 80 percent success rate. That rate goes down by 10 percent per minute thereafter. "At 10 minutes, the chance for success is nonexistent," he said.
The USGS defibrillator team calculated that it would take seven or eight minutes for someone in the building to get to the nearest emergency room.
The portable defibrillators are the size of a briefcase and have been placed in strategic spots throughout the Reston campus, which consists of a seven-floor main building and two smaller buildings. About 2,000 employees work at USGS and numerous visitors are at the site every day.
The units cost $3,000 each and contain enough tools and instructions for a trained volunteer to assist during a heart attack. So far, the AED team has trained 27 volunteers on how to use the defibrillators. According to McCord, the devices are "idiot-proof," meaning they won't allow a shock to occur unless it detects a shockable irregular rhythm.
Top management support and a recently enacted Virginia law made it easier for the USGS to obtain defibrillators, McCord said. A Virginia good samaritan law, enacted last July, includes certain parameters that, if followed, free defibrillator users from liability. As a result, "victims can feel good about it being used correctly and that the oversight of that use is properly monitored," said McCord.
USGS hopes that other federal offices will follow its lead and install defibrillators in their workplaces.
For more information, contact Dan McCord at dmccord@usgs.gov.
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