Fire Chief Jackie Brockman, left, and Assistant Chief Spenser Hunter of the Amity Volunteer Fire Department demonstrate how the LUCAS CPR device works. The piece of equipment provides consistent, automatic chest compressions to patients, allowing medics or firefighters to focus on other medical interventions.
With a life hanging in the balance, first responders found themselves equipped with an extra pair of hands.
The Amity Community Volunteer Fire Department responded to a patient in full cardiac arrest. The patient had no heartbeat and needed to be revived. Just days prior, the department had received an ingenious piece of equipment — a compression machine, which could automatically perform the intensive job of giving chest compressions to revive a patient.
The device, known as a LUCAS CPR machine, allowed the first responders to focus on getting blood pressure, check for other injuries and do other interventions on the patient.
“It took us seconds to get this set up, and then minutes into the clock, medics had her back,” said Spenser Hunter, assistant chief of the Amity Volunteer Fire Department.
Having seen the impact of the device, Amity fire officials are working to raise money for a unit of their own. They hope to join a number of departments within Johnson County — including those in White River Township, Bargersville and Trafalgar — that can be employed during rescue runs.
Amity is raising the $14,000 needed to buy the machine. Though the price is steep, they see it as a small cost for the potential to save lives.
“I’ve been in the fire service since 1975, and this is probably one of the biggest advances I’ve seen,” said Jackie Brockman, fire chief of the Amity department. “I personally think that every fire department should have this on its truck. It does its job.”
The LUCAS device is a system that provides chest compressions automatically. The device is put around a patient with a padded piston suction cup over their chest. Once the patient is safely strapped in, with their hands secured to prevent injury to themselves or the first responders, the machine goes to work.
The piston delivers consistent compressions for as long as the first responders need it, with the ability to adjust the rate of compression, depth of the piston and other aspects.
Consistency is vital when it comes to trying to revive someone, Brockman said.
“We may have two or three people doing CPR, everyone does it at a different rate or different depth. One guy may push harder than another,” he said. “There’s constant motion, constant timing, constant depth.
The machine improves the quality of chest compressions, increases the levels of exhaled carbon dioxide in patients — a positive indicator of good ventilation — and sustains life-saving circulation during prolonged resuscitation attempts, according to clinical trials.
Research has shown that using the device increases blood flow to the brain by more than 60% compared to traditional CPR, which can be physically intensive, and continuing it for the minutes necessary to revive a patient can
“You do two to four minutes of CPR by yourself, you’re done. And every time you stop, it’s 45 seconds to 90 seconds to get the heart pumping again,” Hunter said. “With this, you don’t have to stop.”
A representative from Stryker, a medical device company that distributes the LUCAS machine, approached Amity fire officials about using it on a trial basis in their ambulance runs.
Though department leadership felt it was worth investigating, not everyone saw the benefit of such a device, Brockman said.
That changed the first week after the unit arrived in Amity.
Using a combination of manual CPR, as well as the LUCAS device, they were able to revive the patient and stabilize her. As they transported her to the hospital, she had a pulse and was breathing.
Unfortunately, once at the hospital, the patient did not wake up. Her family had to make the decision to take her off life support. But the family was able to say goodbye to her before that, Brockman said.
And because she was an organ donor, and because her breathing and heartbeat had been revived, doctors were able to use her organs.
“They were able to get four organs to save four different lives,” Brockman said. “If we didn’t have that machine and hadn’t been able to get her back, by the time we got her to the hospital, those organs would not have been usable.
The benefit they’ve seen convinced the department they needed a LUCAS device of their own.
Amity Volunteer Fire Department had use of the LUCAS on loan through December. Now, they are collecting money to buy their own, and are working on other ways to offset the cost.
“It’s one of those tools where you’d love to have it, but the budget says no,” Brockman said. “Yeah, it’s $14,000, but with that run we had, even though she passed, they were able to get four organs that went to people who needed it. Figure we saved four lives — what’s the price of saving a life?”
