The thefts of defibrillators from a shop in Rathnew, Co Wicklow and from a village in Co Louth on Friday night have been criticised.
The defibrillator stolen from outside a shop in Drogheda, Co Louth was found on Monday.
CCTV footage shows the medical device being stolen by two young men. Local resident Kenneth Flood, who was one of a dozen local people who looked for the device over the weekend and paid for it, said the Order of Malta will check the device today to see if it has been damaged.
Dr David Menzies, medical director of national Community First Responder network criticised the thefts on Monday and said it was sad communities which had “stepped up to the plate” to provide a defibrillator had seen the machines stolen.
“This is a community problem and that’s the really sad thing about this. These are communities who stepped up to the plate and said it’s for us to fix this, they fund raised, they provided a defibrillator, they’ve left it available for anybody in their time of need and it’s been taken,” he told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland.
“Nobody in their right mind would buy a defibrillator on the black market. You want a guarantee that it’s going to work, you want to be sure you’ve bought it off somebody reputable. So there’s really no resale value for this and they do seem to go missing like this out of hours and they have on occasions turned up down the street or behind the hedge and so forth.”
Dr Menzies said time is of the essence when somebody suffers a cardiac arrest. “If somebody collapses you’ve got a couple of minutes to make a difference that will save their life and if you have to go and get a key or a code to open a cabinet, that adds a layer of delay.
“Some of them (defibrillators) are locked in that situation and the ambulance service has the ability to hold the key or the code and to make that available to the people who’ve made the phone call. But it adds a layer of delay.
“You wouldn’t lock up a fire extinguisher, this should be treated in the same way. But this is the price that sometimes get paid.
Community First Responder Ireland would certainly recommend that every defibrillator is installed in sight of CCTV where possible and I think in both these cases that is the case. Hopefully there will be something there.”
De Menzies said defibrillators can deliver an electric shock to a patient’s heart if they are in cardiac arrest.
“Ireland has about 13 of these a day. Outside of hospital environments the chances of survival are completely time dependent.
So there’s two interventions that are proven to work: one is early CPR and Ireland is really good at that, we have a rate of over 80 per cent bystander CPR which is probably world leading.
“The second intervention is defibrillator and that’s really effective within the first 10 minutes. So this is not something that the ambulance service or the health service on its own can solve.
“The cheapest defibrillator is just north of €1,000 plus VAT, they need to be kept in a heated cabinet as cold weather will degrade the battery. You’re looking at €1,500 for a community to replace this.”
The thefts of defibrillators over the weekend are the latest in a series of such crimes.