What are the benefits of having an AED in the workplace?

Approximately 30,000 Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrests occur every year in the UK.

Without immediate treatment, 90-95% of sudden Cardiac Arrest victims will die. An AED may not seem like an essential piece of office kit, until you need it. When you consider your workplace supplies, investing in a piece of life-saving medical equipment might not be at the top of the list.

Yet with over 30,000 sudden cardiac arrests (SCAs) occurring outside of hospital in the UK every year it’s never been more important to be prepared. An automated external defibrillator (AED) is a vital piece of life-saving equipment that no workplace should be without.

With the average emergency service response time to a cardiac incident now standing at eleven minutes, it’s important that your workplace knows how to act quickly when a medical emergency such as a cardiac arrest occurs.

Less than 1 in 10 people in the UK survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

This has been partly attributed to two factors that businesses are perfectly placed to improve:

• there aren’t enough people prepared to perform CPR when someone has a cardiac arrest

• there aren’t enough defibrillators By having an AED in your workplace and training colleagues in CPR, businesses can play an important part in helping more people survive a cardiac arrest.

SCAs usually cause death if they are not treated within minutes. The only effective treatment for someone suffering a cardiac arrest is the combination of CPR and the use of a defibrillator (AED). The emergency services average response time to a cardiac event related incident in an urban area is 11 minutes. If a defibrillator is used and effective CPR is performed within 3-5 minutes of cardiac arrest, the chance of survival increases from 6% to 74%.