Titania Limited is an award-winning software security company located in Barbourne Road, Worcester. The company has partnered with the Heartsafe City of Coon Rapids, near Minneapolis St Paul in the USA, to help Worcester become the first Heartsafe City in the UK.

On Monday, Titania brought US police officer Bryan Platz to The Guildhall, who presented me with a framed document from the Mayor of Coon Rapids declaring his city’s desire to partner with our city in this project. Now it’s not often a fully uniformed American cop is my guest in the Parlour, so I was interested to hear what he had to say.

Bryan has attended over one hundred cardiac arrests during his 18 years as a US cop. 95% of them died, often leaving grieving loved ones behind. Some were quite young. These incidents often happened at home or work, with people around them who panicked and had no idea how to help.

In recent years, Bryan has helped train 15,000 local residents to use cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and automated external defibrillators (AEDs), machines which shock a stopped heart back to life. Death rates have fallen as a result.

Bryan ran a number of free training sessions at Titania’s office this week for local workers, so I went along to learn more. I heard that permanent brain damage occurs just three minutes after the heart stops beating, unless CPR is started on the victim. Emergency services do not usually arrive within three minutes, but if a bystander quickly starts CPR and this is followed by AED use, the survival rate increases from 5% to 85%.

I think I could now help save a life and hope that we can encourage many more residents to do the same. We need many more easily accessible AEDs and many more locals who know how to use them. Readers can learn more by searching for “Coon Rapids Heartsafe” on the internet.