According to a study conducted by Prof Bernard a senior lecturer at Monash University's department of epidemiology and preventative medicine, it was found that more number of rural people of heart attacks than their counterparts who live in urban areas.
Statistics show that heart disease mortality rates in rural areas are 30 % higher in men and 21 % higher in women than in urban areas. But the solution to this problem cannot be tackled by increasing the number of ambulance services. The main reason being that the population in the rural Victoria is very less and not more than 1000 in a town. Hence the ambulance would do less than one job a week and maintaining an ambulance station would cost about $1 million a year. To help solve the problem AutoPulse was introduced to reduce the number of deaths due to heart attack in the rural areas.It is a mechanical heart compressor and is found id to more effective than the manual compressors. The ambulance in the rural areas are fitted with these which costs about $20,000 and three were sent to Geelong and two each to Bendigo and Ballarat. The AutoPulse squeezes the patient's entire chest to provide increased blood flow while the paramedics are free to work on supplying oxygen, medication, defibrillation equipment or driving the patient to hospital. The lead author said that AutoPulse would be of great help in those areas where there are fewer paramedics. The study results were published in the Medical journal of Australia.
