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Paper's bid to buy vital life-saving equipment

An East Midlands daily is hoping to furnish 42 communities with life-saving medical equipment in a new campaign.

The Lincolnshire Echo is urging its readers to back its Have a Heart campaign which is aiming to buy defibrillators and train locals to use them in the 42 areas not already served by the Lincolnshire Integrated Voluntary Emergency Service.

Anyone can be trained to use the medical kit which can be the difference between life and death in hard-to-reach rural areas which take longer for paramedics to get to.

The state-of-the-art machines send an electric shock to the heart to restore a normal heart beat of a patient in cardiac arrest.

Each defibrillator costs £2,000 with extra cost incurred for training the community first responders who will use them but it is estimated that this will save 100 lives a year in Lincolnshire.

In a campaign launch message, editor Jon Grubb said: “There are few campaigns more important than literally saving lives – and that’s what these defibrillators will do.

“For anyone living in Lincolnshire, having these machines in your area can increase your chances of surviving a heart attack by at least 20pc.

“For many communities £2,000 is a small price to pay for the number of people they will save over the next few years.

“If only one in every ten people donates just £1, we will be able to put dozens of these machines in shops, schools, community centres and villages halls across the county. We need everyone’s help to make it happen.”