Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the potential merits of funding the construction of defibrillator networks from the NHS central budget.

No specific assessment has been made. However, in partnership with The British Heart Foundation, the Resuscitation Council UK and the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives, NHS England and NHS Improvement have developed ‘The Circuit’; a database to register defibrillators in the United Kingdom. This will assist ambulance services to identify the nearest defibrillator at the time of an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.