Grant: Planning/Dissemination Grants - IPPH - ICS - Building Healthy Cities - General

"Sudden cardiac arrest" occurs when the heart stops beating unexpectedly. Each year, more than 40,000 Canadians have a cardiac arrest. Less than 10% percent of those who have a cardiac arrest outside of hospital survive. A bystander who sees the event can drastically improve survival by starting chest compressions (CPR) and applying a defibrillator (AED). A defibrillator is a machine that can automatically apply an electric shock to restart the heart. When someone is suffering cardiac arrest, it is very important to restart the heart quickly. Waiting for paramedics to do this is not optimal. Delays of even a few minutes can result in death. As a result, cities around the world have placed defibrillators in public places and encouraged members of the public to use them in an emergency. Unfortunately, less than 3% of cardiac arrest victims outside of a hospital have a public access defibrillator used. This is a missed opportunity to save lives. We plan to gather a group of experts in emergency medicine, defibrillators, engineering, psychology, urban design and policy to rethink our approach to public access defibrillation. We will be discussing barriers to public access defibrillation and brainstorming new ideas to fix the problem. Specifically, we will be thinking about defibrillators in cities to make them safer and healthier places. By gathering people with expertise in a broad range of areas, we hope to generate practical ideas that are worthy of a large study. We are planning to gather for 1.5 days in Edinburgh to share ideas and make plans for a community-level intervention. We will spend time creating what we think would be a good way to increase the chances of defibrillation for victims of cardiac arrest in cities. We will then apply to the CIHR with our plans for funds to support a trial. We hope to use this meeting to develop an ongoing working group of experts which aims to study the problem in depth.