THE Northern Ireland Ambulance Service (NIAS) has confirmed that it has redeployed defibrillators between ambulances in order to compensate for faulty defibs in some of their vehicles.
In a letter seen by the Andersonstown News, the NIAS asked staff to redeploy alternative defibrillator devices – Zoll AED Pros – from their Scheduled Care Service Vehicles to their Double Crewed Ambulance Vehicles.
This is due to the development of faults in some of the Corpuls3 defibrillators that are currently deployed in the Double Crewed Ambulances. The NIAS confirmed some faults had been reported by crews and were occurring when "different modules on the device have failed to connect to each other", in issues which the NIAS says are "intermittent".
In a statement the ambulance service say "the vast majority have been picked up through standard daily checks," and that "NIAS has not identified any patient harm arising from the reported errors."
"NIAS has put in place a number of safeguards to support service delivery since the errors were identified, including providing advice to crews on how to deal with an error should it occur and deploying multiple resources to emergency medical situations," they said.
"To provide extra resilience while the replacement of the power boards takes place, NIAS is temporarily redeploying alternative defibrillators devices from Scheduled Care Service vehicles to its Double Crewed Ambulances. This is in addition to the Corpuls defibrillator and is there as a back-up defibrillator.
"This will provide an alternative device in the unlikely event that an ambulance crew experiences a connection error when attending a known or suspected cardiac arrest."
The NIAS said they had "engaged with the supplier and manufacturer of the defibrillators to investigate the root cause of the reported errors and address them.
"Following extensive investigations, the manufacturer has not identified any systematic fault in the NIAS devices but has recommended replacement of the device power boards to improve connectivity."
