In 2004, the City of Kenosha started a Public Access Defibrillator Program in the hopes to increase cardiac arrest survival.

Each year sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) claims the lives of approximately 250,000 people in the U.S. alone, according to the American Heart Association.  Unlike a heart attack in which blood flow to the heart muscle is temporarily blocked, the primary cause of sudden cardiac arrest is ventricular fibrillation (VF), a life-threatening condition in which the heart’s normal electrical signals become erratic, causing the heart to stop pumping blood effectively.  When this occurs, the victim immediately becomes unresponsive, stops breathing, and has no detectable pulse.  SCA may occur with or without a heart attack; but, either way – without intervention – it is deadly within minutes.  Defibrillation, or restoring the heart’s natural rhythm by applying an electrical shock, is the only definitive treatment for VF.

The underlying causes of SCA are varied and not all are well understood.  Many victims have no history of heart disease, or, if heart disease is present, it has not functionally impaired them.  SCA can strike both men and women, often without warning.

Surviving SCA is largely dependent on how quickly a victim is defibrillated.  For each minute that defibrillation is delayed, the victim’s chance of survival decreases by seven (7) to ten (10) percent (Larsen M.P., et al. Annals of Emergency Medicine 1993;22:1652-1658). Cummins, RO et al., Annals of Emergency Medicine, 1989;18:1269-1275).  When defibrillation is provided by community emergency medical services many factors can limit the timely delivery of lifesaving defibrillation to remote rural locations or to urban locations that may be difficult for emergency responders to reach due to the need to negotiate traffic, staircases, elevators, escalators, or crowds of people.  Thus, response times for paramedics or emergency medical technicians to arrive on-site with a defibrillator are often more than ten (10) minutes, resulting in average SCA survival rates in the United States of less than five (5) percent.

Both the American Heart Association and the National Center for Early Defibrillation have stated that if even 20% of SCA victims could survive, as many as 40,000 additional lives could be saved each year.

Widespread deployment of defibrillators is the only feasible method of achieving early defibrillation.  Compact portable automated external defibrillators  are sometimes called AEDs.  The few minutes saved by using a defibrillator before emergency medical services arrive can mean the difference between life and death.The goal of a community-wide early defibrillation program is to strengthen the community’s “Chain of Survival” by achieving a 3-minute response time from collapse of the victim to arrival of the defibrillator and delivery of the first defibrillation shock.