Fifth-year students Sinead Lawless, Jane Anne McKevitt, and Rachel McCormack from Presentation College Thurles have won the HRB special prize at the BT Young Scientist as well as First Place in the Senior Group Social and Behavioural Sciences Category for their "'A Shock in Time: a community based study of response times for each stage of the chain of survival model of cardiac resuscitation for out of hospital cardiac arrest.'

'There were a number of things that inspired us to do this research', says Sinead Lawless, the project Leader. 'My grandad died of a cardiac arrest on the street in Thurles a few years ago, and we all felt that there had been a lot of stories in the local media about people dying of heart attacks. So we decided to look into what might be done to raise awareness and hopefully save lives in our community.'

Jane Anne McKevitt takes up the story.

'First of all we did a random sample survey of members of the public and found that while 75% of them said they had done a first aid course, only 35% of this group said that they felt confident enough to deliver CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) in an emergency. We discovered that there were at least 7 defibrillator units in Thurles, five in schools, one in a sports club, and one in a business premise, so we next did a stratified survey to examine things like, how was the defibrillator stored? Who had access to it? Were there lists of people trained to use it? We followed this up with a time and motion study to see how quickly the defibrillator could be deployed by a trained person on site. You have about eight minutes from when someone goes into sudden cardiac arrest to restart the heart before permanent brain damage sets in.'

'The results from the time and motion study were very revealing.' adds Rachel McCormack. The response times ranged from a very impressive thirty seconds all the way out to twenty three minutes. There were all sorts of reasons for the delays, which got us thinking, could we design and develop an app that might address some of those delays.

We sat down then and designed a three stage app. The first stage is a simple 'call the emergency services 112 or 999' reminder. The second stage is a quick video of how to do CPR. The third stage lists all the defibrillators in Thurles and we're working on being able to show this on a map. Working with a software developer, we've developed a prototype Android app to do this.'

According to Sinead,

'We plan to copyright the app and contact the Pre-Hospital Emergency Care Council to see if we can incorporate their master defibrillator location data into it, so that it could be used countrywide to let you know where is the nearest defibrillator to you. So many people came up to us at the exhibition telling us that it is a super idea, that we're really delighted to have made something which could make a real difference and help to save lives.'