Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the number of publicly accessible defibrillators in (a) St Helens North, (b) St Helens, (c) Merseyside and (d) the North West.

The Department does not hold up to date information on the number of Public Access Defibrillators. Whilst St Helens Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) does not commission defibrillators for use in public areas, it has confirmed that many, if not all, general practitioner practices will have defibrillators in-house. However, the CCG does not buy or maintain these on behalf of practices.

The British Heart Foundation (BHF) funded a project to determine if it was feasible and affordable to establish a national database of Public Access Defibrillators and to make this available to ambulance services. The project concluded it was feasible and the BHF has now committed the funds to implement the database and has identified an ambulance service to be the lead organisation helping the development of this database, which will be offered to all services once shown to be safe and effective.