[notafraudster]

The biggest surprise to me is that he died of a heart attack in an airport, where presumably AEDs are in ready supply and people are everywhere so it'd be immediately noticed. I really thought the survival rate in such a circumstance, even for catastrophic heart attacks, was pretty good!

[CaptArmchair]

I was recently taught in first aid class that the survival rate of an out-of-hospital heart attack is about 10-12%. Heart attacks have a ton of causes, lifestyle is just one of those. Sometimes, things go very wrong without an apparent, explainable cause. Medicine hasn't yet figured out everything that might cause a heart attack.

Even with help on scene, people still die in hospital a few days later because of a mix of underlying causes.

CPR on scene doubles the chances of survival, but they aren't a guarantee someone will survive. The entire point of learning CPR is to maximize the number of people that don't have to die in the event of a heart attack, no matter how minute that fraction.

About 800k people suffer a heart attack in the U.S. yearly accordign to the CDC (this is both in-hospital as well as out-of-hospital).

[Dave3of5]

> I was recently taught in first aid class that the survival rate of an out-of-hospital heart attack is about 10-12%.

In my first aid course we were taught that the speed in which an AED is applied is the main contributing factor. Giving that most workplaces/homes/restaurants ...etc don't actually have an AED you would normally get one when the ambulance arrives.

Someone in the NHS had worked out the graph for distance from ambulance and % survival. He gave us all our % chance survival if our office didn't have and AED based upon the average rate from our work places and that we needed to wait for the ambulance. This was under the assumption that someone would start CPR almost straight after the arrest.

In our office this % without an AED was < 10% something insane like 6% chance survival. With an AED survival is much higher. He gave the figure of 95%+ survival rate for offices that had AED in them.

I brought this up in a company meeting with all staff there and the question was how much is an AED. I had already asked this and it was £750 for an older second hand one and £1100 for a brand new one.

Never bought the flipping AED.

So from what I made out my life was worth < £750 to the CEO.

[sokoloff]

Imagine if there was a meteor shield the company could buy for £250. If they didn't buy it, is your life worth less than £250 to them?

You have to divide the cost by the likelihood of a life being saved to find the proxy figure for what that's worth. If there's a 1% chance that an AED will save a life during its useful lifespan, that suggests that they're valuing the life at less than £110000 (assuming a company would be inclined to buy new and that there are no required inspections along the lifespan of the AED).

I think the actual likelihood that any individual AED located in a company's workplace will save a life is much less than 1%.

[Dave3of5]

The individual likelihood is not <1%. It's probably more like 10-15% per person. some would be low some much higher. But I wasn't the only employee there there was around 12 employees in that office. There were several who were > 50 years old and in the high risk category which could put them up to 25%.

So given this plus your statement about the £1100 for a brand new one divided by the lifespan which I think is 5-10 years for each £110 per year I would say the value my life < £1000.

The CEO himself was very high risk and had actually been in the hospital recently for a suspected heart attack (a small one that didn't require intervention).

> Imagine if there was a meteor shield the company could buy for £250

The chance of being hit by a meteor is several orders of magnitude smaller than having a heart attack so this comparison is invalid.

A better comparison is being in a car crash and yes if they didn't spend £250 per 5 years to drastically improve my chance of dying in a car crash my life is worthless to them.

The company never listened to me on any of my suggestions so I think they were not listening and just denied my request the same as ever other request of mine they denied. I once asked for a new mouse and they denied that as well some CEOs are just like that.

[sokoloff]

The likelihood is not "10-15% per person" that, during the operational lifespan of any given AED, that someone would have a heart attack at work, be treated by that specific AED, and have that treatment be life-saving. (That was the point of the meteor comparison.)

[Dave3of5]

The lifespan is 10-15 years depending on the model. Most people were at moderate risk, unfit, drinking alcohol, poor exercise, high stress job ...etc. For moderate risk 10-15% is the stat over a 5 year period. Most where moderate a few, 2 I think, were low and we had a few high and one very high risk given he'd possibly already had a small heart attack.

Also note that you didn't take into consideration that the device is used for all in the office so over the 5 years it's cost must be divided by the number of employees it will cover which in this case was around 12.

Again your Meteor comparison was extremely poor. You are comparing something that is very common, a middle aged person having heart attack, to something extremely uncommon a similar demographic being hit by a meteor. Also to note that you can't say it it £250 to protect from a meteor strike it would likely be extremely expensive to protect an office from that versus the insanely cheap £1100 to almost guarantee that any of us survive a heart attack.

I've eddited to show the actual lifespan of the AED which is 10-15 year

[blitzar]

Insurance would probably pay them out nicely - your death at work is probably worth +1x your annual salary - maybe more.

[Dave3of5]

> Insurance would probably pay them out nicely

I wouldn't have bet any money on that. The dude was unwilling to pay £1100 for a life saving device what makes you think he would buy insurance that would pay upon employee death.

I know for a fact I didn't have any of that cover as my current company does pay death in service and it's like 4 times my yearly salary to my wife. So if he had anything like that he would have said so.

He's was just a cheap fuck. Companies often cheap out of safety gear to make a quick buck happens everywhere all the time.

[meheleventyone]

That’s pretty scary having had one a few years ago I didn’t realise the risks of dying were so high. Is that for a specific case (e.g. heart stopped completely) or for all the stuff that gets lumped in there for example I was still walking around and so on despite the clot forming which probably has a more medical name but colloquially gets called the same thing.

For context when I had mine at 39 I was swimming so swam on for another thirty minutes at a reduced pace, got changed, walked home, lay down for a bit before getting my wife to drive me to the hospital. Ended up with a stent put in. Got lucky I guess from being reasonably fit as there was no visible damage to the heart on an ultrasound.

[sizzle]

Can any expert here help me understand why his heart attack was not reversible by administering tPA to dissolve blood clots?