An inspiring mum has raised thousands to buy defibrillators in her hometown following the tragic death of her teenage son.
Jamie Rees, 18, suffered an unexplained cardiac arrest at a friend’s house in the early hours of New Year’s Day last year.
The only defibrillator nearby was locked away in the teen’s old school – leaving his friends to perform CPR in a desperate bid to save him.
He died five days in hospital later without ever regaining consciousness. In just 12 months Naomi Rees-Issitt, 43, has raised £55,000 and installed 25 defibrillators – which can be accessed 24/7.
The family have also paid for eight portable machines which are carried by tradesmen and hauliers.
Naomi of Rugby, Warks, is now planning to apply for a slice of a newly-announced £1million government fund to buy more.
She is also backing the Mirror’s campaign for them to be installed in public spaces across the country. We are calling for a law requiring their availability at locations such as sports grounds and public buildings.
Naomi, a charity manager, said: “I fully support the Mirror campaign. If we can make a difference in Rugby, imagine what can happen country-wide if the right laws are in place and money made available.
“The big thing we want to highlight is accessibility. These defibrillators need to be accessible 24/7, not just at certain times of the day.
“Sadly on the night Jamie collapsed, his friends can be heard on the 999 call being told to get the defibrillator from the school.
“But it was locked inside. There was a defibrillator two minutes away that could have saved his life but it was locked inside the school.
“Jamie collapsed at 2am. They need to be accessible. The ones we have installed in Rugby have PIN codes and are always accessible.
“92% of out of hospital cardiac arrests happen in the evening, in the community. There is just no protection.”
Naomi began her fundraising just three weeks after Jamie’s death. “We sat down as a family and decided to try to raise £1,500 to get an accessible defibrillator for outside the school,” she said.
“We set up the JustGiving page and overnight it went to £3,000. So we decided to carry on and see what we could do.
“Since we lost Jamie in January we have managed to raise £55,000 and install 25 defibrillators, plus 10 waiting to go in.
“These things can be bought and installed so quickly. I actually went round Rugby yesterday servicing them all. Trust me, there are a lot. In the town centre we include bleed kits with them. If you can have two pieces of life-saving equipment, even better.”
Naomi organised raffles, race and bingo nights and did a parachute jump as part of the fundraising effort.“The public got behind us so much,” she said. “Jamie was such a popular lad, with the most beautiful face. “He just deserved better.”
“We have organised two sites in Leamington Spa for defibrillators and one in Northamptonshire.
“We’re just going to carry on what we’re doing. There is plenty more money in the pot.”
Earlier this week the government unveiled a new £1million fund to increase the number of defibrillators.
Organisations are invited to bid for a slice of the cash and match funding to get machines for their community.
This could double the 1,000 new “automated external defibrillators’ expected to be made available.
Naomi said she supports the scheme, but hit out at the government over their lack of action.
“Obviously now we’re going to apply and see if we can get access to the new government fund,” she said. “But the difficulty for us is that this has been raised three times in Parliament by our local MP and we’ve had no feedback at all. We are no further forward than we were a year ago.”
More than 30,000 people suffer cardiac arrests outside hospital every year in the UK, and just one in 10 of them survives.
Public defibrillators, which deliver a shock to restart the heart, are used in less than a tenth of cases. Using a defibrillator within five minutes raises the chance of survival by 40%.
