Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to help (a) increase survival rates from out-of-hospital cardiac arrests and (b) increase the availability of defibrillators in Bath.

In order to increase survival rates from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, NHS England has worked in partnership with St John’s Ambulance and others to increase access to cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training. Local ambulance trusts, charities including St John’s Ambulance, the British Heart Foundation, and private providers deliver CPR training and the use of defibrillators both in the community and in schools, under the Restart a Heart programme.

The Government’s position is that local communities are best placed to make decisions about procuring, locating and maintaining automated external defibrillators (AEDs). Over 110,000 defibrillators are registered in the United Kingdom on The Circuit, the independent AED database. Over 30,000 of these have been added in the past two years, many as a result of local community led action.