BT and the Community Heartbeat Trust are putting our well-known phone boxes to the heart of our communities again. They are funding the installations of defibrillators which are life-saving machines, inside phone boxes across the country in the hope to help save lives.
The scheme Adopt a Kiosk was introduced in 2008 after a request from local communities flooded in. Adopting a kiosk allows residents to retain their BT phone boxes for only a £1. Installing a defibrillator inside a phone box can have a huge impact when it comes to saving a life of someone who is in a cardiac arrest.
The defibrillator has step-by-step voice instructions so that anyone using it knows exactly what they are doing. The device also analyses the victim to see whether or not they are suffering from a cardiac arrest and then deliver an electric shock to restore a person heartbeat back to normal.
Chief Executive of LIVES, Nikki Silver, who is working to promote the use of phone box defibrillators, said: “We know that immediate CPR and defibrillation in those first moments increases the chances of survival by 70 percent.
That is why public access defibrillators and local communities learning CPR play such a critical role in the chance of survival.”
