Cardiac arrest: Thousands of defibrillators unknown to 999 service

Tens of thousands of defibrillators across the UK risk being unusable because 999 call handlers do not know about them.

When someone has a cardiac arrest, ambulance staff can only direct bystanders to the nearest defibrillator if it is on a central register.

"That could be the difference between life and death," said Adam Fletcher, head of British Heart Foundation Cymru.

A campaign to register defibrillators on The Circuit has now been launched.

Survival rates are low in the more than 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests each year in the UK, according to the British Heart Foundation (BHF) - with fewer than one in 10 people surviving.

BHF said early CPR and defibrillation could double the chances of surviving and it was often down to 999 call handlers being aware that a defibrillator was nearby.

"If we don't know a defibrillator is there, we can't send somebody to get it, to potentially save somebody's life," said Carl Powell, the clinical support lead for cardiac care with the Welsh Ambulance Service.

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Source: BBC News, 22 October 2021