Anne Rabbitte (Galway East, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to address the House on behalf of the Minister for Health, Deputy Donnelly, about the work under way as part of the out-of-hospital cardiac arrest strategy with regard to the training and deployment of automated external defibrillators, AEDs. I thank the Senator for using his time to raise this matter so we can have a conversation about it and make the wider public aware of the great work that is going on.

Community first responders are trained volunteers who are co-ordinated and dispatched by the National Ambulance Service to attend actual or potentially life-threatening emergencies. As these volunteers are professionally trained in CPR and the use of defibrillators, they can respond to certain medical emergency calls in the community in those important first few minutes prior to the arrival of an emergency ambulance. Community first responder groups, An Garda Síochána, emergency services personnel, fire services personnel, health services staff and other organisations all play a key role in saving lives and responding to out-of-hospital cardiac emergencies.

As the Senator may be aware, the HSE is currently in the implementation phase of the out-of-hospital cardiac arrest strategy for Ireland. This strategy was developed by an interdisciplinary steering group, which had the aim of increasing the number of people who survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in Ireland, using national and international experience to address all the elements in the chain of survival. The HSE has since established an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest strategy implementation group to progress this work. The group is led by the National Ambulance Service and actions are being progressed by partner organisations, including Dublin Fire Brigade, the Pre-Hospital Emergency Care Council, the Irish Heart Foundation, and as the Senator noted, An Garda Síochána. At present, the National Ambulance Service has a list of locations for more than 2,000 AEDs on its national computer-aided dispatch system which it can use to advise emergency callers, although this is in its infancy.

The most important thing the Senator raised is that, following the pandemic, not everyone within the voluntary organisations has returned to the role of being a first responder. Therefore, the National Ambulance Service has been looking at other ways of equipping people to become first responders because time is critical in these situations. We have seen that in Donegal and in what the Senator said with regard to An Garda Síochána. There is a strategy and a very clear plan to roll it out but it is important that we roll it out at pace. That is for the simple reason that there is a deficit in the number of community first responders at this moment in time. It is important that, where we know there is a deficit, the National Ambulance Service works with the local fire brigade or An Garda Síochána to train and equip them, so there are no gaps left in any communities across the country.