Fire Grant Buys New Heart Monitors

Kent's ambulances will be stocked with new heart monitors and defibrillators soon thanks to a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Kent received a $187,000 award through the Assistance to Firefighters Grant program to restock the city's ambulances with heart and CPR equipment.

With the grant, the fire department will buy four new heart monitors, 11 automatic external defibrillators and five automatic CPR machines.

Kent Fire Chief James Williams said the auto CPR machines will help reduce firefighter injuries by allowing firefighters to use their seatbelts while transporting a patient instead of performing CPR manually.

Williams said the machines are more steady and provide more precise chest compressions.

"(The machines) perform CPR to a better standard than what we can do traveling down the road in the back of an ambulance," he said.

Williams said the current heart monitors are about eight years old and lack cardiac telemetry and CO monitoring. The city planned to replace them, but at a cost of about $28,000 each it would have taken five to six years to replace them.

"When we sat down this year we looked at a lot of different things we could use the money on," he said. "One of the things we thought was important to look at was our EMS. One of the things we felt we were lacking on was our heart monitors."

Some of the automatic defibrillators will be placed on board the department's personnel and officer vehicles, which can respond to an accident or other emergency faster than an ambulance when out in the community.

Kent City Council members agreed to accept the federal grant earlier this month.

Kent Safety Director William Lillich said the grant comes with a 10 percent local match requireent. He said the department will use miscellaneous capital funds to cover the city's 10 percent share.