A NURSE from Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital is aiming to raise £1,000 to buy an automatic defibrillator for an East African medical centre.

Practice nurse Sue Jennings will fly out to Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre in Moshi, Tanzania on Friday.

Mrs Jennings, 42, of Milton Heights, near Didcot, is travelling with the charity OK Links (Oxford and Kilimanjaro Links) which was formed by a group of Oxford healthcare professionals engaged in a two-way transfer of skills with clinicians in Tanzania.

Mrs Jennings, a mother-of-one who has been a theatre nurse for 13 years, is going to share her skills with doctors and nurses at KCMC and hold a training session about resuscitation. When she arranged it, Mrs Jennings was surprised to learn the medical centre did not have a defibrillator, so she set about fundraising for one.

She said: “At the moment, any patient that suffers a cardiac arrest in KCMC has a very poor chance of survival, due to the lack of staff training and a shortage of appropriate equipment.

“I am going to train the staff but, without a defibrillator, only a small proportion of patients will survive a cardiac arrest.

“A defibrillator will help save hundreds of lives every year.

“The price of a cup of coffee in this country — about £2 — would pay for a patient’s care for a year in Tanzania.

“Tanzania is such a wonderful country and I am really excited to be going to meet the team and to see how they work in such different environment to ours.

“The charity wants to pass on skills and knowledge from the health service in this country, so that nursing staff in Tanzania can become more self-sufficient.”

A link was first established between Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre and the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust in radiography in 2005.

Since then there have been a number of visits.

Wendy Edmundson, who is also a practice nurse at the John Radcliffe, is accompanying Mrs Jennings on the week-long trip.

A defibrillator sends a therapeutic dose of electrical energy to the patient’s heart to shock it into beating normally again.

affrench@oxfordmail.co.uk