A SOCIAL media campaign has helped to identify 196 pieces of life-saving equipment across Greater Manchester that can now be used by North West Ambulance Service NHS Trust (NWAS) to help cardiac arrest patients.

NWAS’ 'Shock-tober' campaign, which ran throughout October, saw the public, schools, organisations and celebrities including Paddy McGuinness using the hashtag #findthedefib to locate defibrillators that could potentially be used to save a life in the event of a cardiac arrest.

NWAS asked its followers to ‘send a selfie and save a life’ whenever they came across a defibrillator, and tweet its location so that it could be checked against the list of defibrillators that 999 call handlers use to direct callers to when trying to save the life of a person in cardiac arrest.

Automated external defibrillators (AEDs) are small machines which can ‘shock’ a person’s heart into restarting. They are easy to use as they talk through the process and they won’t deliver a shock unless it is required. There is no clinical training required to be able to use the machine.

Tweeted 5,864 times, #findthedefib led the ambulance service to 686 defibrillator locations, some as far as Hong Kong and Australia. Of those identified in Greater Manchester, 196 were unknown to the trust and will be added to NWAS’ database to help save the lives of patients in the future.