Armed with AEDs, Police Cut Response Time
&NA; · Emergency Medicine News · 2002
In communities where police are equipped with automated external defibrillators (AEDs), people who have a sudden cardiac arrest have a better chance at survival, according to new research reported in the Aug. 13 Circulation. Police in Miami-Dade County, FL, equipped with AEDs cut response time to sudden cardiac arrest victims by almost three minutes, the study showed. During the first 10 minutes after someone has a cardiac arrest, every minute saved means about a 10 percent increase in relative survival, said Robert J. Myerburg, MD, the director of the cardiovascular division and the American Heart Association chair of cardiovascular research at the University of Miami School of Medicine. The 9-1-1 emergency dispatch system in Miami-Dade was re-configured so that both police and fire/rescue were dispatched to certain medical emergency calls. Using this dual-dispatch mode, the time from the call to first responder arrival was 4.88 minutes compared with the historical response time of 7.64 minutes. With the dual-responder system, help arrived on the scene of a cardiac arrest in less than five minutes for 41 percent of calls, compared with 14 percent for the standard fire-rescue calls. From Feb. 1, 1999, to April 30, 2001, Miami-Dade 9-1-1 dispatchers received almost 2.25 million calls, 56,321 of which were medical emergency calls that triggered the dual deployment system. Police arrived first 56 percent of the time. Survival was 17.2 percent for 163 victims with ventricular fibrillation or pulseless ventricular tachycardia (irregular heart rhythms that require an electric shock to correct). The survival rate had been only nine percent during the one-and-a-half years just prior to establishing the police responder program. Unfortunately, 61 percent of the victims had non-shockable rhythms, which reduced the absolute survival benefit to 1.6 percent.