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 assessment he has made of the merits of introducing a website and smartphone application containing data on all 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), 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 the availability of PADs, the Community Resuscitation Steering Group (which is chaired by the NHS England National Clinical Director for Heart Disease and has a wide range of stakeholders) has highlighted various issues and taken steps to try to improve them, including a project funded by the BHF 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 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.

Reticulating Splines