Firefighters to Start Use of Cardiac Equipment : Emergencies: Providing county crews with defibrillators is expected to save up to 62 heart-attack victims annually.

In a move that is expected to at least triple the number of lives saved in emergency cases, Ventura County firefighters on Monday will begin using electric defibrillators to jump-start the hearts of cardiac arrest victims.

All 32 of the county’s fire stations have been equipped with at least one electric defibrillator, said Bryan Vanden Bossche, coordinator of county fire emergency medical services. Four have two of the machines.

After four hours training, all of the county’s 340 firefighters are now equipped to use the machines, Vanden Bossche said.

“We’ll take the device on all calls where there would be a possibility of cardiac arrest problems,” Vanden Bossche said. “So if there’s a chest-pain call, a shortness of breath call, we’ll go in with a defibrillator.”

Stalled for two years because of a dispute with the county’s firefighters union, defibrillators have been recognized for years by medical experts as valuable tools to save lives.

Last year, the Fire Department was summoned to about 11,000 emergency calls for medical help, about 4% of them cases of cardiac arrest, Vanden Bossche said.

Cardiac arrest was to blame for about 390 deaths around Ventura County last year, said Barbara Brodfuehrer, administrator of the county’s emergency medical services.

A recent study of last year’s 410 adult heart-attack patients showed that only 3% to 5% survived. Most of the patients died because their hearts had stopped or were pumping at a rapid or dangerously irregular rate.

“These were life-threatening cases,” she said.

Defibrillators are used to run a high-voltage current through the chest wall to correct those deadly heart rhythms.

They also are used to jolt the hearts of pulse-less and unconscious victims of accidents such as drowning, fire officials said. They will not be used on accident victims who have suffered traumatic wounds.

Brodfuehrer predicted that defibrillators will make a big difference in a heart-attack victim’s chances of survival.

Instead of seeing 12 to 20 patients survive, up to 62 people are expected to live now that firefighters are equipped with the machines.

A patient’s life will also depend on how quickly emergency aid is summoned after a call for help, she said.

Heart-attack victims have a better chance of living if someone is available to pump the heart manually, called cardiopulmonary resuscitation, within minutes after their collapse.

County emergency medical officials plan to collect data to measure the success of defibrillators in the field.

Ken Maffei, president of the Ventura County Professional Firefighters Assn., said he also believes the machines will greatly help firefighters save lives.

But Maffei was skeptical of the county’s predictions of survival, given that some rural areas are isolated from fire crews.

“We don’t have the optimum conditions in Ventura County,” he said.

For Ventura County, the use of defibrillators has been a long time coming. Their purchase was approved by county supervisors two years ago, but their use was stalled until recently, in part because of resistance from the firefighters union.

Firefighters believed that their comments, recorded on voice-activated tape recorders that come with the machines, could be used against them in court, Maffei said.

That obstacle was removed in May when the county Board of Supervisors and the union approved a contract that protects firefighters from lawsuits resulting from the defibrillators.

The board also approved an annual stipend of about $1,250 for each firefighter trained to use the machines.

“There’s some apprehension about the tapes still,” Maffei said. “But that’s not going to disappear until we use them a little bit and we see how the process will work.”