Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if his Department will allocate additional funding to local health trusts to install defibrillators in rural locations that are hard to reach by ambulance.

Since the end of the Department’s National Defibrillator Programme in 2007, local ambulance trusts have had responsibility for the provision of defibrillators and are best placed to know what is needed in their local area.

In order to support the National Health Service, the Government has provided £1 million to make public access defibrillators more widely available and to increase the numbers of people trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). This builds on the £1 million funding provided in 2015/16, which resulted in 700 publically accessible defibrillators being placed in communities across England and more people trained in CPR. A grant has been made to the British Heart Foundation to disburse the 2016/17 funding and it is currently accepting applications for defibrillators and CPR training kits.