United Hatzalah
JERUSALEM — In what may be the largest purchase of defibrillators ever made in Israel, volunteer emergency medical services organization United Hatzalah recently purchased 1,000 defibrillators for its volunteers.
The amount needed to purchase the defibrillators was donated through a matching grant campaign that was run at the end of 2015 and by various donations over the course of 2016. “I want every EMT, paramedic, and doctor who volunteers with our organization to have a defibrillator,” said president and founder of Hatzalah United Eli Beer.
Beer added that, “my dream is that any person under cardiac arrest will be able to have a trained volunteer with a defibrillator arrive to help them in under 90 seconds, no matter where they are in the country. Whether they are in the Golan, Sderot, a small Arab or Druze village, Eilat, or in the heart of the Negev, no one needs to die from a treatable cardiac arrest.”
The first defibrillators from the recent purchase will be handed out to volunteers in the coming days.
“The reason why United Hatzalah has so much success in life-saving is that our goal is to arrive at the scene of a medical emergency in less than 90 seconds. When a responder arrives with a defibrillator in such a short amount of time, the chance of survival for the person suffering a cardiac arrest increases tremendously,” Beer said. “With the addition of more volunteers equipped with defibrillators and spread out in cities, towns, and communities across the country, we can hit the 90 second response time mark on a national level. We can and we will.”
This year, the organization is launching another matching campaign, whose goal is to increase the number of volunteers operating around the country, so it can continue to lower EMS response times. So far, the organization has succeeded in lowering the national response time to under three minutes. In major urban centers, such as Jerusalem and parts of the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, the response time has hit the 90-second threshold.