Student Senate announced Monday that Bradley’s campus has received a donation from Advanced Medical Transport of Peoria of three new automated external defibrillators.
Amanda Fuller, Senate’s vice president of Campus Safety, said she started looking into bringing more AEDs to campus after a student expressed concerns about a lack of accessibility.
“I had a student come to me and was really just worried about the lack of AEDs on our campus in a lot of the residential areas like Main Street Commons and St. James in particular,” Fuller, a senior health science major, said.
For Fuller, providing more AEDs on campus is an important issue She had a friend who passed away of a heart attack in her dorm room when she was 18 because no AED was around. According to Fuller, bringing additional AEDs to campus will help provide accessibility to more students.
“We want [the AEDs] to be easily accessible to the most number of students,” Fuller said. “St. James is particularly challenging … so we are considering attaching them to the blue light systems because one: you’d look for the blue light and all of a sudden, there is your safety thing, [and] you should be contacting the police anyways. And also because that way if I live in [building] 1005, I can’t swipe into [building] 1011 to get an AED. So, this would be something that all students in the area can access.”
Fuller said she and her department are considering putting an AED in the lobby of Main Street Commons, so it would be available to students on all floors of the building.
“For Main Street Commons, just putting it in the lobby because again if it is all the way up on the top floor, that is great for those students, but the bottom floor students don’t have easy access,” Fuller said. “We want [the AED] to be visible. So, every day you walk in and out of your building, so you’ll know where it is.”
Crime Prevention Officer Sean Savage of the Bradley University Police Department said AEDs can make a huge difference in saving someone’s life during a heart attack.
“It can take the police a whole 30 seconds to get there, and 30 seconds in a heart attack can mean life and death,” Savage said.
Currently, Savage is working with Fuller’s committee to decide how putting the AEDs on the blue light systems can be done while making sure they are protected.
“I think it is a great theory if we can come up with a way to secure them and protect them,” Savage said. “Protecting our investment is a big thing … so we need to find a way to make sure they are secure within the case and make sure they are not taken from the case by someone who is not there to save someone’s life.”
Student Senator and Campus Safety Department member Luke Nelson said he would like to implement educational classes to teach students how to properly use the AEDs.
“I would like to, as we are getting more and more on campus, maybe have classes on how to use them or how to deal with those situations so the person is not freaking out,” Nelson, a junior management and leadership major, said. “That would be really nice to get people involved on campus and informational classes.”
Fuller said she agrees with Nelson and plans to do more to fully educate students on AEDs.
“Especially even having a map for students of where AEDs are located on campus, so you know where they are,” Fuller said.
