Editorial: Life-saving resuscitation isn't a luxury

Waikato Rowing Club committee member Ron Satherley with an Automatic External Defibrillator. Photo / Peter Tiffany

EDITORIAL

If you were to ask the average New Zealander whether they thought a poor person was as entitled as a rich person to immediate treatment in the event of a heart attack, most would consider it a rhetorical question - the only sane answer is yes.

This makes it all the more incongruent – and distressing – to read a report earlier this week that life-saving defibrillators are more likely to be located in richer, urban areas than in those poorer or rural parts of the country.

In many ways, this runs against the grain of the long yards New Zealand has marched since the establishment of the Social Security Act of 1938 laid down the principles of universal access to healthcare for all New Zealanders, regardless of economic means.

This tradition has long been a source of pride, used as evidence that the big heart of our humble island nation cares enough not to let the poorest among us die. In some instances, it's even mockingly used as a show of our superiority over the United States and its colder approach to healthcare.

But how much right do we really have to this moral high ground if we're willing to divide the eight people who suffer out-of-hospital cardiac arrest daily along socio-economic lines? Do some mothers, daughters, fathers and sons really have more of a right to life than others?

A defibrillator shouldn't be a reward to the community that happens to be the best at raising funds – something that's invariably easier if those around you have more disposable income. And it definitely shouldn't be treated as a luxury item, restricted to the pohutukawa-lined streets of New Zealand's most desirable suburbs.

It should be treated as what it is: a healthcare apparatus that offers the difference between life and death.

As long as this uneasy divide persists, as a nation it will remain difficult to argue that we truly care for our poor as much as we do for our rich. We weren't satisfied with that status quo in 1938 and we should be even less satisfied with it today.