Local services
202 employees of the Debrecen County City Mayor’s Office and the Debrecen Public Space Inspectorate completed the life-saving course, one of the conditions for the office to become a Life Saving Point.
In 2018, the National Ambulance Service created the Lifesaving Point certification, open to service providers, companies, businesses, and other organisations, providing the conditions for immediate lifesaving. To qualify for the Life Saving Point certification, a significant proportion of staff must have mastered lifesaving basics and have a defibrillator on site that anyone can use.
The National Ambulance Service provides training free of charge to companies and organisations wishing to obtain the Life Saving Point certification and purchase a defibrillator.
171 Debrecen Mayor’s Office and 31 employees of the Public Space Inspectorate have completed the course. On the 28th of January 2025, in the Simonffy Hall of the Old Town Hall, more than 60 of them received the commemorative card certifying that they had successfully mastered the correct steps of CPR during the “Hero Training” course of the National Ambulance Service. The Debrecen Mayor’s Office is now the 17th Life Saving Point in the city.
At the beginning of the ceremony, Dávid Ménes, the station chief paramedic of the Debrecen Ambulance Station of the National Ambulance Service, specially thanked his comrades’ contribution: paramedic Zsolt Deák, paramedic Gergő György Kovács, paramedic Zsombor Dalmi, paramedic Bálint Nagy, paramedic Péter Kovács, rescue officer Csaba Zám, paramedic Attila Tim, paramedic Gergő Farkas, rescue technician Szabolcs Erdőháti, and paramedic László Szilágyi, who participated in the training as instructors in their free time and who also gave a resuscitation demonstration.
In her welcoming speech, Deputy Mayor Dr. Diána Széles mentioned, among other things, that the citizens of Debrecen, including the office staff, have a common desire to come together and do something for others. She is proud of the colleagues who applied for the training and felt the urge to increase their knowledge to help others professionally if necessary.
The Deputy Mayor also specifically called the attention of those who took part in the training to update their resuscitation knowledge from time to time and to download the application on their phones, which can be found at https://szivcity.hu, which will allow them to receive an alert if resuscitation is needed in a public area within 500 meters of them. They can also receive information about where defibrillators are nearby. The circle of those who can help is also increased because, thanks to the Debrecen local government, all 10th-grade students participating in school health examinations can learn about resuscitation. Finally, Diána Széles thanked the Debrecen Ambulance Station employees, the country’s largest ambulance station, for their selfless work, which allowed the city’s citizens to live safely.
Notary-general of the city of Debrecen Dr. Antal Szekeres emphasised that the organisational culture established by the local government and the mayor’s office includes helping others. The organisational culture has now been extended with this knowledge expansion. It is important that there are now nearly fifty Life-Saving Points nationwide, and from now on, the Debrecen Mayor’s office belongs to this community. Antal Szekeres thanked, among others, Deputy Mayor Diána Széles for being the initiator of the office becoming a Life-Saving Point, and in fact, she completed the course. He is confident that in the future, the number of those who complete the resuscitation course from among the employees of the mayor’s office will increase significantly. Thus, more and more people will become capable of assisting in an emergency.
Director of the Northern Great Plain Regional Ambulance Organization of the National Ambulance Service, Dr Ferenc Korcsmáros, said that the brand name Live Saving Point was created by the Director General of the National Ambulance Service, Dr Gábor Csató, who is originally from Debrecen. At the same time, most of the nearly fifty Life-Saving Points currently in the country are in the Northern Great Plain Region, 25 in the region, of which 17 are in Debrecen. This shows that the Debrecen Ambulance Station and the citizens of Debrecen carry the success of the Life-Saving Point close to their hearts. It happened that the defibrillator installed in Debrecen had to be used the day after the handover, and this resuscitation was successful. Ferenc Korcsmáros also said that never before in the country had so many employees been trained in CPR as now in the case of the Debrecen Mayor’s Office. This justifies equating the brand name Life-Saving Point with the name Debrecen. The director also highlighted the importance of using the “SzívCity” application. The decisiveness and speed of help are important since, in the event of cardiac arrest, the chance of being able to help someone in trouble with a defibrillator decreases by 10 percent every minute. Therefore, it is vital that as many people as possible have CPR knowledge and that there are as many semi-automatic defibrillators throughout the city. By operating such systems, the chance of surviving sudden cardiac death can be doubled. He said that the National Ambulance Service provides lifesaving training to as many people as needed and as many times as required for organisations that wish to obtain or have already obtained Life-Saving Point certification. In addition, the Debrecen Ambulance Station is open on the first Monday of every month for those wishing to learn CPR or refresh their previous knowledge.
Several speakers at the event mentioned the owner of Nagykonyha Kft., Róbert Nagy, as an exemplary entrepreneur in the field of social responsibility. He donated the defibrillator that was then placed in the New Town Hall to the local government ten years ago. For years, since the coronavirus epidemic, he has been continuously providing hot meals to the employees of the Debrecen Ambulance Station. Now, he has offered another device to the office and pledged to donate a defibrillator to the city every month this year. The equipment he has just donated and purchased by the Office will be installed in the reception area of the Old Town Hall at 20 Piac Street and the Town Hall’s reception area.
Source and photo credit: debrecen.hu
