Page 51 - Occupational Health & Safety, January/February 2019

commended. But voluntary deployments, along with well-meaning fundraisers and charitable donations, are clearly not getting the job done on their own.
Only two states (Oregon and Rhode Island) broadly require AEDs at many places. Some states have targeted mandates for places such as health clubs, schools, government buildings, and the like. But these limited mandates lead to only a small increase in the number of AEDs in a community, cover very small response areas, and protect a fraction of a community’s population. Broad mandates, in contrast, have the power to increase the number of AEDs in a community more rapidly, cover larger response areas, and protect a much larger percentage of a community’s population.
So how do we solve the AED shortage? The answer is clear: state legislative mandates requiring AEDs at most public locations. Large-scale mandates, coupled with true Good Samaritan legal protections, will lead to a rapid increase in the number of AEDs and will improve the odds of survival for thousands more peo- ple experiencing sudden cardiac arrest. And for those who push back with arguments over SCA prevalence in any given location, we need only look at the broad mandates for fire extinguishers— whereas fires occur with much lower frequency—as an example that blows any such objection out of the water.
To make things easy for would-be public policy advocates will- ing to take on the challenge of pushing for this new approach, we
should look to the Model AED Law included in this article. This law, if enacted in every state, would require lots of AEDs, provide meaningful legal protections to AED owners and uses, and rid us of the silly and unhelpful regulatory requirements found in most state AED laws today.
We’ve already discussed the importance of a new “SCA re- sponse squad” model with the goal of a 50 percent rate of bystander CPR, 50 percent rate of public access AED use, and enough AEDs so that defibrillation can be delivered within five minutes for most SCA victims. If we pair this new model with effective legislative action that helps bridge the gap left by the national AED shortage, we may very well be on our way to seeing meaningful change in SCA survival.
Richard A. Lazar is a leading national AED program design, oper- ations, and compliance expert and President of Readiness Systems. Readiness Systems designed and offers AED Sentinel, the industry’s first remote AED monitoring system built for every AED program; provides AED program compliance support; publishes national AED Program Design Guidelines that set the industry standards for AED programs; and manages the AED Law Center. He is also a member of the SCA Foundation Advisory Council. He resides in Portland with his wife and is a proud, new grandfather. Learn more at www.readisys.com.
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