July 30, 2019

Dutch cable installers save lives with AEDs

Filed under: Health by Orangemaster @ 11:26 am

This past year, installers of Dutch cable company Ziggo who drive around with Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) in their vans and know how to use them have been able to respond to 50 emergency calls while working. With some 75 installers able to assist the emergency services, they assisted 30 times, either reanimating or keeping people away from the victims so that paramedics can do their job.

In practice, paramedics are not always able to get to people in the first few moments which is crucial, while an ambulance ride is at least 10 minutes. On occasion, a cable installer can actually help, as they can be reached by WhatsApp.

Despite me not being a fan of the cable company, I have to say this is a nice initiative that very much deserves to be mentioned. Since Wi-Fi is seen more and more as a lifeline, Ziggo was smart to combine Wi-Fi with having AEDs at the ready and personnel trained to use them.

According to the Dutch heart foundation Hartstichting, about 17,000 people have heart attacks outside hospitals, the amount of citizens who can help in such situations rose by a third to 225,000, and the amount of available AEDs has increased by more than 45% to almost 18,000. Trained citizens arrive 2.5 minutes earlier to scenes than emergency services and can start reanimation right away, saving lives.

(Link: vodafoneziggo.nl, Photo by Jacek SzymaƄski, some rights reserved)

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January 18, 2012

Beating up paramedics, the latest trend in senseless violence

Filed under: Film,General by Orangemaster @ 1:15 pm

This public service announcement is in English with Dutch subtitles, and when I saw it, I think I responded to it the way the makers intended. However, I did mentally note that the ‘scooter kiddies’ harassing the paramedics at the end were probably not Caucasian, fitting the standard profile of these petty criminals at least in the big cities.

We’ve talked about this kind of advert before and it’s not news, but it is a form of violence that seems to mystify people. The bits I’ve read tend to say that certain ethnic groups do not like being told what to do by paramedics and associate them with the police telling them what to do, but that sounds more like an excuse.

Two weeks ago, the film ‘Doodslag’ (‘Manslaughter’) premiered in Eindhoven, starring stand-up comedian Theo Maassen as a paramedic. He swats ones of these annoying kids blocking his ambulance with a dying baby in it, but then a bit too hard. The big question is: does this make him a criminal too?

The film’s opening shot highlights ‘rude behaviour’ using Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s epic sample of ‘You get real man! Boy oh boy!’ as he answered a typically street-level right-wing quip of ‘Get real, man!’ in Parliament. The Prime Minister’s remarks basically confirmed to the entire country that street language is now commonplace, which sparked much debate and is ironic considering that the big letters at the start of the film quote the PM as saying that ‘we need to take back the country from those ‘jerks’, implying that jerks are running the country. But Maassen says he is convinced that the film will change the way the Netherlands thinks. “It is an exciting, cool film with guns and sex,” he adds.

(Link: www.omroepbrabant.nl)

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