Defibrillators

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Tuesday 24th June 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for starting this debate; I very much agree with his central points. I also pay tribute to the Oliver King Foundation and Oliver’s father, whom I have had the pleasure of meeting on a number of occasions. Indeed, I think that the noble Earl would agree with me that the Liverpool primary schools’ defibrillator programme is a remarkable effort on the part of the foundation, which embraces all primary schools in the city. As part of the project, 12 staff in each school were able to receive training. It is a model for what ought to happen in the rest of the country.

Noble Lords have given us a lot of information about what is happening and raised some of the concerns. I will refer to the research undertaken in Hampshire which was published earlier in the year, the authors of which included the South Central Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Southampton. They reviewed all calls to the ambulance service between September 2011 and August 2012 following a heart attack. For all emergency calls made from locations other than a person’s home, the call handler specifically asked whether the caller could access a defibrillator. If so, instructions were given on how to use it. During the course of this study over a number of months, the service received just over 1,000 calls about confirmed cardiac arrests away from hospital, which was the equivalent of one for every 600 members of the public each year. For 44 of those incidents in 34 different locations, the caller was able to access an external defibrillator—that is 4.25%—and it was successfully retrieved and used in less than half the cases, 18 cases, before the arrival of the ambulance.

This gave an overall use rate of just 1.74% of all cardiac arrests recorded, which the authors understandably felt was disappointingly low and was apparently similar to previous figures from the London Ambulance Service. Looking at the Hampshire picture, 673 defibrillators that could be accessed by the public were located in 278 places, including 146 devices in large shopping centres. The research also showed that only just over one in 10 nursing homes, around one in 20 railway stations and a similar number of community centres and village halls had defibrillators. The suspicion is that figures in Hampshire are probably similar to many other parts of the country. This shows the scale of the challenge before us, for which we hope for a government response.

Noble Lords mentioned St John Ambulance, to which I am grateful for the briefing I received. The survey work which it undertook shows that a majority of the public think defibrillators should be compulsory in NHS buildings, care homes, concert halls, sports centres and gyms, workplaces, hotels and supermarkets. This seems persuasive evidence that the public would welcome a more decisive response by the Government.

In relation to schools, where I would have thought there was an overwhelming argument for having a defibrillator and trained staff—and indeed trained students—we are relying on the response which the Government have given. This is simply to say that it is up to each school, then relying on changes to the Children and Families Act in relation to the duties of governing bodies and the common-law duty on staff to act in loco parentis while children are at school. We could expect a little more action now from the Government. Particularly in relation to schools, I want to hear that the Department for Education will reconsider its disappointing response so far.

The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, made a good point about the need to help people to use defibrillators and for education programmes. I also take her point about the need to help sports clubs. Does the noble Earl not think it would be good for health and well-being boards to take this on? Because of the potential collaboration between local government, the health service, third-sector and many other organisations within a locality, might they not spearhead an approach to getting many more defibrillators fitted and people trained to use them?

Finally, Public Health England is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Department of Health. Could the noble Earl be tempted to give an instruction to Public Health England to treat this as a priority for the future? The Department of Health has a really positive role to play if, through Public Health England and health and well-being boards, this was seen to be important and I am sure we could make much further progress.