Background

Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is a time critical and life-threatening medical emergency. Prompt bystander defibrillation using public access defibrillators (PADs) can increase odds of survival by up to seven-fold. Despite the efficacy of bystander defibrillation, PADs are rarely used and ensuring timely access to PADs remain a significant challenge.

In the UK, there has been an increase in the use of technologies to enable rapid identification and deployment of PADs to OHCAs including the introduction of a i) national PAD registry (The Circuit) and subsequent integration of Circuit data with emergency dispatch to direct bystanders to nearby PADs and ii) the GoodSAM responder app, a mobile application that crowdsources nearby responders through mobile positioning to provide resuscitation care including PAD retrieval.

The effective use of these technologies to enable prompt bystander defibrillation are underpinned by voluntary registration of PADs by citizens and organisations and the quality of data provided. Incomplete registries and poor data quality can lead to delays in defibrillation as bystanders may not be directed to the nearest PAD or cause issues with retrieving the PAD (e.g. inaccurate location data, code not provided to get into locked cabinet containing the PAD).

Objectives

This research aims to facilitate early bystander defibrillation and improve OHCA survival outcomes by:

– Investigating the motivations for voluntary PAD registration on online registry platforms and barriers to citizen participation.
– Identifying what data should be recorded in registries to enable emergency dispatch to effectively communicate to bystanders.
– Define what quality means in the context of PAD registry data and its subsequent use to support rapid identification and retrieval of PADs by bystanders.
– Developing a design intervention and user-facing tool to support quality data collection on PAD registry platforms based on users’ experiences with existing registry platforms.