23 Mar Coffee shops, 24-hour ATMs Best Locations For Public Cardiac Defibrillators

MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Christopher L.F. Sun MIE PhD candidate
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
University of Toronto, ON, Canada

MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

Response: Strategic automated external defibrillator (AED) placement is critical for reducing the time to treatment and improving survival outcomes of public out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA). Many previous studies have focused on examining broad location categories without considering temporal availability (i.e. hours of operation). These broad location categories are often composed of many individual businesses, each with their own unique properties including varying accessibility. Examining specific businesses and locations while incorporating hours of operations and time of OHCA occurrence can improve AED placements in respect to where and when they are needed.

Our goal was to examine individual businesses and municipal locations that maximize spatiotemporal OHCA coverage, the number of OHCAs that occurred within 100 m of each location when it was open. We identified a total of 41 businesses and municipal locations with 20 or more locations in Toronto to include the study. We proceeded to rank these businesses and municipal locations by spatiotemporal coverage.

We found that coffee shops and bank automated teller machines (ATMs) were the best places to put public AEDs, corresponding to 8 of the “Top 10” ranking stop in Toronto. Specifically, the Canadian coffee shop chain Tim Hortons ranked first of all 41 businesses considered.

MedicalResearch.com: What should readers take away from your report?

Response: We hope this work can lead to the development of private-public partnerships to help improve the awareness and distribution of AEDs in Toronto. Identifying well known local businesses or municipal locations for AED placement can help bystanders build a strong association and awareness to the closest AED in the case of an emergency. Furthermore, temporal accessibility is a major consideration in our rankings and should continue to be factor in determining the best locations for AED placement as per our previous work: https://medicalresearch.com/author-interviews/one-five-cardiac-arrests-occur-near-inaccessible-defibrillators/26933/

MedicalResearch.com: What recommendations do you have for future research as a result of this study?

Response: We hope that this inspires other group to examine “outside the box” approaches to increase AED accessibility and awareness.

MedicalResearch.com: Thank you for your contribution to the MedicalResearch.com community.

Citation:
Ranking Businesses and Municipal Locations by Spatiotemporal Cardiac Arrest Risk to Guide Public Defibrillator Placement
Christopher L.F. Sun, Steven C. Brooks, Laurie J. Morrison, Timothy C.Y. Chan
and On behalf of the Rescu Epistry Investigators
Circulation. 2017;135:1104-1119
Originally published March 20, 2017

Note: Content is Not intended as medical advice. Please consult your health care provider regarding your specific medical condition and questions.

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Last Updated on March 23, 2017 by Marie Benz MD FAAD