What to know to save a life: The key to cardiac arrest survival

Bystander training on spotting and using defibrillators can greatly improve cardiac arrest survival, but many people don’t know what to do.

When a woman collapsed on an escalator at the Buffalo airport last June, Phil Clough knew what to do. He and another bystander put her flat on her back and checked her pulse and her breathing. Then she stopped breathing altogether. Realizing that she might be having a cardiac arrest, Clough immediately started doing chest compressions, pressing hard and quickly on the center of her chest, while others nearby called 911 and ran to get an automated external defibrillator. Within seconds of receiving a shock from the AED, the woman opened her eyes. By the time the airport rescue team arrived a few minutes later, she was conscious and able to talk with rescuers.

911-initiated AED Response: Would you be willing to bring your AED to someone nearby experiencing a cardiac arrest?

While AED registries have traditionally been used to meet regulatory requirements, the growing use of dispatch-accessible, time-of-need emergency AED registries offers meaningful new opportunities to increase the use of these lifesaving devices. In addition to telecommunicator initiatives, communities are going further by using their registries to alert AED owners and program volunteers to nearby cardiac arrest events.

Emergency Telecommunicators Need Access to a Community AED Registry

Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) telecommunicators are a critical link in the cardiac arrest chain of survival. Placing the proper tools in their hands can improve outcomes.

The PulsePoint Foundation provides PSAP technology to make "Is there an AED nearby?" an unnecessary question during cardiac arrest call processing while also advocating for broad adoption of this lifesaving capability. Our goal is for the telecommunicator to instead inform the caller of the location of nearby AEDs. Consider how much more effective it would be to say, “there is an AED at that store,” and direct the caller to “send someone to retrieve the AED from the customer service counter,” as CPR instructions begin? We back our advocacy and commitment with comprehensive and accessible resources. By providing exceptional, industry-supported AED registry solutions at no cost—and we genuinely mean free in all aspects—we strive to remove deployment impediments.

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