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 introduce a national register of publicly available defibrillators.

In August 2018 the British Heart Foundation (BHF) formally announced £4.5 million of funding for a partnership with NHS England, NHS Scotland, Microsoft and ambulance services to establish a national database of Public Access Defibrillators (PAD) and to make this available to ambulance services. This database will later be offered to all services once shown to be safe and effective.

The principal intention is to make the data available to, and controlled by, ambulance services, so that PAD location information is readily available when someone makes a 999 call. The BHF is developing the database with full professional guidance and with the support of the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives. The database will be piloted by West Midlands Ambulance Service and the Scottish Ambulance Service, before being rolled out across the United Kingdom.

The database will launch in spring 2019 when PAD owners will be able to register their PAD onto the database through their local ambulance service. The database will include detailed locations of PADs across the UK, which will allow ambulance services to direct bystanders of a cardiac arrest to the nearest one. It will also act as a network so that PAD owners can support each other in relation to PAD maintenance. This partnership will help people to access life-saving equipment, and will support NHS staff and the public when attempting to save the lives of people who suffer cardiac arrest out of hospital.