Ashbourne med student saves a life on london street

The quick-thinking actions taken by medical student John Reidy from Ashbourne have been commended by doctors at London’s Air Ambulance and Barts Health NHS Trust. John performed chest compressions (CPR) on a young woman, found collapsed in the street, for approximately six minutes until the emergency services arrived. Immediate CPR is vital for someone whose heart has stopped (cardiac arrest) to protect the brain from lack of oxygen. The events have been captured and re-told in the prime-time BBC Two series ‘An Hour To Save Your Life’, screening on Tuesday of this week on BBC2.
John, who is 27, is a student at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). A dentistry graduate from Trinity College Dublin, he is now studying medicine at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, part of QMUL.
On his way to a tutorial one mornng, he cme across a crowd around a woman collapsed on the footpath.

“I had never done CPR in a real-life situation before, but I guess I just switched into autopilot mode at that point and took over doing the chest compressions straight away. There was no time to waste, and all I could think about was that I had to focus 110 per cent on doing good CPR because this person’s life depended on it.”
When the police and then London Ambulance Service arrived, followed by Dr Gareth Davies and paramedic Tony Montebello from London’s Air Ambulance, they took over the care of the young woman, Francita Farrell, a 32 year old mother of four.
The ambulance service paramedics used a defibrillator to deliver shocks to Francita’s heart. After the third shock, Dr Gareth Davies confirmed he could feel a pulse. Her heart had started beating again; however she was not breathing properly and remained deeply unconscious. Dr Davies and paramedic Tony Montebello quickly decided they needed to protect Francita’s brain by cooling her (getting her body temperature down) and taking over her breathing by giving her an anaesthetic and putting her on a ventilator. This was all done at the roadside. They then transferred Francita to hospital. After scans and tests that ruled out a bleed on her brain or blocked blood vessel in her heart as being the cause of the cardiac arrest, intensive care specialists continued cooling her body to 34 degrees and keeping her in an induced coma for 24 hours before attempting to wake her up.
Remarkably, and thanks to the quick and effective chain of care that she had received, Francita has no neurological (brain) damage from the period when her heart had stopped and was not pumping blood and oxygen to her brain.

Dr Ross Hunter, consultant cardiologist at Barts Health NHS Trust, said: “John played a fundamental part in saving Francita. The early CPR he provided in those first few minutes basically kept her brain alive until the ambulance staff could restore her heart rhythm with an electric shock. The sophisticated medicine and technology that Francita received subsequently would all have been futile if it weren’t for his quick actions and good quality CPR. Francita’s case emphasises how important it is to have people trained in basic CPR in the community, because the chances of someone like John walking past at the right moment are astronomically low. The small device that we have implanted in Francita is now protecting her heart and has already saved her life on two separate occasions by shocking her heart back into a normal rhythm.”
The pioneering trauma and emergency care provided by the London’s Air Ambulance charity and Barts Health NHS Trust features in the BBC series ‘An Hour To Save Your Life’, airing Tuesday 16th June, at 9pm on BBC Two.