(The Philadelphia Daily News posted the following article by Jim Nolan on its website on March 18.)
PHILADELPHIA — It’s enough to give you a heart attack.
Two years ago, SEPTA bought state-of-the-art, mobile cardiac defibrillators.
And for more than a year now, SEPTA’s police force has been trained in the use of the life-saving devices.
So as long as some unfortunate commuter has a heart attack right at the transit agency’s headquarters on 12th and Market, there’s a possibility one of the devices might someday be used to save a life.
That’s because the five Life-Scan and Compliant defibrillators that cost more than $2,000 each are sitting in a closet in SEPTA’s medical office on the concourse level at 1234 Market St.
For a transit system that covers five counties, reaches two neighboring states and serves 400,000 daily customers on 133 bus, trolley and rail routes, it might seem like a dubious concentration of resources.
SEPTA police officers wonder why the defibrillators haven’t been distributed among the department’s seven police zones. That way, officers who face an emergency situation anywhere in the system would potentially have faster access to the equipment and a better chance to save a life.
“We think they would do a lot better out in the street than sitting in some drawer or closet,” said Sal Perpetua, president of the Fraternal Order of Transit Police.
But SEPTA says the devices are not officially in use. And agency officials won’t say when they will be used, or if they will ever be.
“We’ve had some testing and some training, but a decision has not been made on deployment,” said SEPTA spokesman Richard Maloney. “It’s under review. We’re still studying them.”
Maloney said that several issues complicate what otherwise seems to be a logically preferable alternative to having the equipment sit in a closet.
He cited a recent state Supreme Court ruling suggesting the equipment should be used only by trained emergency medical services personnel.
The spokesman also claimed that a two-year study of the use of mobile defibrillators at airports in the Chicago metro area, which handled 200 million people, found that they were used only 18 times.
The results: 11 resuscitations, three deaths and four cases in which it could not be determined whether having the defibrillator played any role in the outcome of the patient.
SEPTA statistics on cardiac emergencies on its system were not immediately available.
With a sprawling transit system involving 15,000 transit stops and 280 subway-elevated, trolley and railroad stations, SEPTA is also unsure of what it should do with the limited number of defibrillators it has, and what it would take to cover the system adequately.
“Where are you going to deploy them?” asked Maloney. “How many do you have to maintain? Do you put them in all police cars? In major Center City stations?”
Central to all these issues is money. SEPTA has an $847 million operating budget and a $466 million capital budget for fiscal year 2003.
It faces an accumulated deficit of approximately $14 million and is facing a $16 million cut in aid under the new state budget.
The cost of buying and maintaining the units, as well as the potential legal liability from their use or misuse, is also being weighed, said Maloney.
Still, commuter advocates see no sense in SEPTA’s keeping the life-saving devices it does have locked up in one spot.
“It’s disturbing but not surprising for SEPTA to spend money on something and have no planning,” said Matthew Mitchell of the Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers, a nonprofit transit watchdog.
“It doesn’t make very much sense. It’s like buying a personal computer and sticking it in the closet for two years. Obviously these devices don’t do any good if they’re sitting in a closet.”
Every first-responding fire department unit and all EMS ambulances carry automated external defibrillators, or AED’s, said a Fire Department spokesman.
The devices are also deployed at Philadelphia International Airport, in addition to numerous private corporate offices, including Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc.