HEART STOPPING — RNs Kim Perrea and Robb Simpson display a new AED for saving the lives of heart-attack victims at Clinton Correctional Facility. Photo by Sherry Halbrook

Prisons lead NYS in lifesaving innovation

By SHERRY HALBROOK
It’s unlikely you think of yourself as safer at work than at home, but a corrections officer at a state prison recently said he wouldn’t be alive today if he hadn’t gone to work at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora on Tuesday, October 30.

That’s the day officer Patrick Patinka suddenly slumped to the floor on E Block with a severe heart attack. His fellow officer immediately began efforts to resuscitate him and called for help.

When the emergency call came in to the prison infirmary, PEF nurses Charles (Robb) Simpson and Kimberly Perrea ran about a quarter of a mile to reach Patinka’s side where they found him still not responding to the CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation his co-workers were using to keep life-giving oxygen flowing through him.

The nurses used state-of-the-art portable technology — an automated external defibrillator (AED) — to get his heart beating again. It took two jolts of high voltage electricity to Patinka’s heart to restart it.

With the help of PEF member Joe Trapp, a physician’s assistant at the prison, they got Patinka sufficiently stabilized to survive the 20- to 30-minute ambulance ride to the nearest hospital, in Plattsburgh. Trapp accompanied the stricken officer to the hospital.

“The COs were already doing CPR and doing it very well when the nurses arrived. The whole response just flowed like clockwork. It was a textbook example of a really professional job on the part of everyone,” said Brian Lecuyer, Clinton’s nurse administrator and another PEF member.

Although Patinka, is not expected to return to work, he told Roy Ano, PEF’s Division 283 council leader at Clinton, that he owes his life to the expert treatment he immediately received at the prison and is deeply grateful for all of the help.

“If we hadn’t had the AED, we probably wouldn’t have been able to save him,” Trapp said.

“We take it with us every time we respond to an emergency, just in case we need it,” Simpson said. “We don’t know what we’re up against until we get there. They just told us an officer was down.”

2006 law requires AEDs
PEF and the state are working to get the lifesaving technology and training into every worksite.

The state now requires all New York state agencies to install AEDs at every worksite and public building and to train all employees to use them.

Agencies have five years to phase in the program of buying and installing the AEDs — which automatically evaluate the patient and signal whether they should be used to administer a high voltage electrical impulse to stop a heart that is beating out of rhythm or is stopped, and then get it started beating again with a steady rhythm — and training the staff.

But the state Department of Correctional Services is wasting no time putting the plan into high gear at its more than 70 correctional facilities and administrative worksites.

DOCS out in front
“DOCS told the state Office of General Services it wants all the AEDs now. We already have 98 of them in the DOCS system, and we soon will have 785,” said PEF Executive Board Member Tom Donahue, PEF chair of the joint Labor-

Management Committee at DOCS.
The goal is to have an AED and someone trained to use it close enough to reach any on-site emergency within three minutes or less.

“Medical studies have shown that the quicker the response to this type of emergency, the greater the results of saving lives,” said Jim Gonyo, PEF chair of the joint Health and Safety Committee at DOCS and council leader of PEF Division 342 at Altona Correctional Facility.

A core group of staff (medical staff and corrections officers) have already been trained at every prison to use the AEDs and they will train the remaining staff.

The AEDs already in use are saving the lives of employees and inmates. At Clinton, approximately six defibrillators were already in place throughout the maze-like buildings and about 20 more were just installed in January.

Although the technology cannot save everyone, “the AEDs are really helping,” Lecuyer said. “We’ve used them twice in the last month, and one was used over the summer to save the life of another staff person here whose heart stopped in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.”

The Communicator Feb. 2007

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