STAFF at the Kingsbridge Tesco shop have been dressing in red to raise money for a defibrillator.

Friday, February 5, is National Wear Red Day for the British Heart Foundation, one of Tesco’s charity partners for 2016, alongside Diabetes UK, and staff came to work in red tops, with red accessories, and some head-to-toe in red.

A woman recently had a cardiac arrest outside the Kingsbridge shop and died, so the staff are aiming to raise the £1,400 for a defibrillator on the outside of the building.

‘If we’d had a defibrillator here, we might have been able to do more,’ said Paul Smith, customer assistant at the Kingsbridge store, ‘all our First Aiders are trained to use them, so we thought it would be a good idea to raise money to have one installed.’

Paul said that there were collecting buckets all over the store and the staff planned ‘three or four more’ fundraising events to raise the money needed, but that he was ‘surprised how much I’ve got in my bucket already’.

An automated external defibrillator is a portable electronic device that automatically diagnoses the life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias of a heart attack and is able to treat them through defibrillation: the use of an electric shock to stop the arrhythmia, allowing the heart to re-establish an effective rhythm.

The machines are fully automatic and give clear, step-by-step, instructions to the user, meaning there is no need to even be trained how to use them and anyone can become a life-saver in an emergency situation.

According to studies in medical journals, the chances of surviving sudden cardiac arrest outside of a hospital are one in 20, but your odds improve ten-fold if an electronic defibrillator is close by.

For every minute lost, survival drops by 10 percent. By 10 minutes, the average time it can take for help to arrive, it is almost always too late, this is when knowing the locations of the automated machines can be life saving.

To find out where all the local defibrillators are in the South Hams, visit our interactive map at https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?hl=en&authuser=0&mid=z1a5INJFr8E8.k2LXRf8GPQXo or use the QR codes on the back of our papers.