Defibrillators

(asked on 26th March 2018) - View Source

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 publicise the the locations of publicly accessible defibrillators.


Answered by
Steve Brine Portrait
Steve Brine
This question was answered on 29th March 2018

NHS England has responsibility for cardiovascular disease (CVD) services, and works with the Resuscitation Council (UK) (RCUK), the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and others to look at ways to promote and improve cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training and the availability of Public Access Defibrillators (PADs).

Since the CVD Outcomes Strategy was published in 2013, which highlighted the lives that could be saved by better CPR and availability of PADs, the Community Resuscitation Steering Group (which is chaired by the NHS England National Clinical Director for Heart Disease) has highlighted various issues and taken steps to try to improve them. These include the initiatives listed below.

- RCUK, the BHF and Arrhythmia Alliance have all undertaken campaigns to increase awareness of CPR and the availability of PADs. All these organisations support the European “Restart a Heart Day” which takes place on 16 October each year and has been successful in training thousands of people in resuscitation skills;

- The BHF funded a project to determine if it was feasible and affordable to establish a national database of PADs and to make this available to ambulance services. The project concluded it was feasible and the BHF has now committed the funds to make it happen and has identified an ambulance service to be the lead organisation helping the development of this database, which will later be offered to all services once shown to be safe and effective; and

- HM Treasury allocated two tranches of £1 million each to purchasing more PADs and the BHF has supervised its distribution: the Government provided £1 million in the 2015 Budget to increase the availability and accessibility of PADs and numbers trained in CPR, and this led to 700 more PADs in communities across England; in the March 2016 Budget, a further £1 million was made available to make PADs and CPR training more widely available in communities across England.

Reticulating Splines