Every week in the UK, 12 young people suffer a sudden cardiac arrest. This can happen in any young person, whatever their fitness level or background. There is no known preventative mechanism. Typically, this occurs in young people doing vigorous exercise, but can also happen spontaneously in older people.

Immediate, high quality first aid, including rapid application of a defibrillator, is the essential response to a suddenly collapsed person. The time to defibrillation is critical for two very important reasons: every minute of defibrillation delay reduces the chance of a successful restoration of cardiac circulation by around 10%, and after three minutes of reduced blood flow, the brain begins to die from oxygen starvation. These three minutes can be prolonged by the application of high quality cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR), which must be started immediately.

It is known that currently, collapse to shock times in the community, even with defibrillator provision at the site, are between 7 and 12 minutes. This is a complex area, and there needs to be a systematic, strategic plan to reduce these long times towards the target time of three minutes. There is absolutely no criticism of the current times being seen: most of the delays are systemic and can only be lowered strategically.

There are four pillars of successful, timely defibrillation, and each of these needs to be addressed to improve the outcomes of these young people.

Click on the links below to see how we are reducing Time to Defibrillation, including our ground-breaking Localisation Flags. These can be ordered here.