WAITING just eight minutes for an ambulance if you suffer a cardiac arrest could lower your chances of survival by 40 per cent if there is no access to a defibrillator.

That’s the heart-stopping statistic that persuaded the Fife Soccer 7s to invest in a Public Access Defibrillator (PAD) – that will be housed at Pitreavie Sport and Soccer Centre – and back the Press campaign for more of the lifesaving devices across West Fife.

Chairman Andi Campbell said up to 1,400 youngsters play football on Saturdays at the Dunfermline site between March and October, and they decided to take action after an incident last month.

He explained: “We had been looking at getting one for the last three or four months but we had an instance a few weeks ago where we had to phone for an ambulance.

“It wasn’t anything to do with heart attacks or anything like that, but the ambulance took eight minutes to get here, and that made our mind up because we’re there in a minute if, God forbid, anything happens.

“Myself, staff at Pitreavie and 40 odd coaches of different teams are trained on it and we were told that if you just do CPR, the survival rate is five per cent, if you can get to an ambulance it’s 35 per cent but if you have a defibrillator on site it’s 75 per cent. It’s pretty amazing.”

Last year, the Press launched a campaign for more PADs and CPR training across West Fife as although there are around 20 defibrillators in and around the town centre, very few are accessible to the public and available around the clock.

Our call for action was backed by Pars physio Kenny Murray, who used a defibrillator to bring Peterhead supporter Val Pearson back from the dead after he collapsed outside Balmoor Stadium with a cardiac arrest in August.

Val thankfully went on to make a full recovery but, had quick-thinking Kenny not been able to treat him, the ambulance crew told him they would have had “nothing left to work on” by the time they responded to the call.

Someone who has had a cardiac arrest, which is different from a heart attack, will be unconscious and will not be breathing properly as the heart stops beating unexpectedly. Classed as clinically dead, without help the casualty generally has minutes to live.

A defibrillator can shock the heart back into a ‘normal’ rhythm and CPR can buy the victim time until the vital spark can be delivered.

Andi said: “I had heard of the Press campaign and that is the thing – where are all the defibrillators and who has got them?

“When we got it on the Thursday, by the Saturday everyone knew about it, and some were telling us it was about time because they didn’t know where one was.

“We felt that with the amount of people down here – 1400 kids and 2000 parents – that is a lot of people to have responsibility for.

“All it needs is for someone to have an underlying heart problem, and a lot of the time people don’t know they have it, but it is there for the community to use.”

With high-profile cases in sport, such as Bolton Wanderers midfielder Fabrice Muamba, bringing the issue of cardiac arrests into sharper focus in recent years, Andi said that the Soccer 7s teams were more than happy to spend the money on a defibrillator.

He continued: “What’s £1,000 to a kid’s life? Hopefully we’ll never have to use it, but by the time an ambulance responds and gets here, we could have saved someone’s life if something happens.

“Anybody can use a defibrillator; you push the button on it and it tells you what to do, so there’s nothing hard about them.”