Hansard

I am delighted to contribute and respond to this important debate on behalf of the Scottish Government. I thank Tom Arthur for lodging the motion and I thank members for their contributions and for supporting the motion so that it could be debated tonight.

I also take the opportunity to join Tom Arthur and others in thanking Douglas Yates and the Levern Valley Defibrillator Community Partnership for its hard work to raise funds for PADs across Barrhead, and for arranging life-saving CPR and PAD training courses.

Stuart McMillan made an important point about the practical use of PADs and the fear of using them. That little bit of training that can be added can give people the confidence to use a piece of technology that is far safer than they imagine. That is part of what we need to do and why it is important to have debates such as this to make that point and to encourage people to take action that will save a life.

The Levern Valley partnership is going above and beyond to ensure that its community can identify the signs of a cardiac arrest and act appropriately. Thanks must also go to those who have donated to the cause and to everyone who has attended the training courses. Their hard work will save lives.

We know that prompt intervention by a bystander can increase the likelihood of survival after cardiac arrest by two or three times. Calling 999, starting CPR and using an available defibrillator in the minutes immediately following a cardiac arrest is where the greatest gains in survival are achieved.

In 2015, we launched the out-of-hospital cardiac arrest strategy, with a commitment to improving survival and outcomes from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. That required improvements to all six elements in the chain of survival: readiness, early recognition and call for help, CPR, defibrillation and pre-hospital resuscitation, post-resuscitation care, and aftercare.

Members will recall that we had two debates on these issues last year. Stuart McMillan mentioned the debate on show some heart, the Jayden Orr campaign; he is a great advocate for that campaign in his local area. We also had a debate on Scotland, a nation of life-savers. Both debates highlighted the importance of defibrillators and CPR and those points remain valid today.

The out-of-hospital cardiac arrest strategy recognises the importance of defibrillators and aims to make the most effective use of those that are available, including funding the University of Edinburgh resuscitation research group to carry out modelling work to inform advice on where defibrillators are best located to save lives. I am grateful to all the communities, voluntary organisations, individuals and businesses across Scotland that have fundraised to purchase defibrillators, often making them publicly accessible.

Anas Sarwar asked about registration to support communities, voluntary organisations and businesses that wish to purchase defibrillators for their premises. In March 2018, we published our guide to public access defibrillators. It provides practical advice to those who are considering purchasing and installing a PAD, including how to register it.

It is great that the British Heart Foundation’s national defibrillator network database, the circuit, is now live in Scotland. The circuit integrates its own PAD register with the existing Scottish Ambulance Service defibrillator database and allows 999 call handlers to direct a bystander or emergency service to a nearby defibrillator during an emergency. BHF aims to increase the use of defibrillators by ensuring that emergency services can quickly locate their nearest PAD, even if it is out of their jurisdiction. I urge everyone who is responsible for a PAD and who has not registered it on the circuit to do so as soon as possible.

Tom Arthur, Stuart McMillan and others talked eloquently about why it is so important that we know where the defibs are, as that can really make a difference in saving a life. My thanks go to the British Heart Foundation for its exemplary work on the circuit project.

As, I think, everyone knows, Save A Life For Scotland is a partnership of public and third sector organisations, including the British Heart Foundation, St Andrew’s First Aid, the British Red Cross, the Royal Life Saving Society UK and Lucky2BHere. The partnership, which includes the Scottish Government, formed after the publication of our out-of-hospital cardiac arrest strategy in 2015 and works to improve cardiac arrest outcomes. It is a unique model, building on a strong foundation of existing work by services, communities and individuals across Scotland.

As Anas Sarwar mentioned, in October 2019, the partnership announced that it had met the strategy’s aim of equipping 500,000 people across Scotland with CPR skills, thereby increasing the number of bystanders able to step in during an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest emergency. That is a fantastic achievement and highlights how we can all work together to improve a person’s chance of survival, and I congratulate all those who have worked incredibly hard to meet that aim.

Members are also, no doubt, aware that the strategy finishes in 2020. The Scottish Government is working with key stakeholders to look at what the next steps should be, and I would be happy to discuss with Anas Sarwar how some of his proposals might feed into that.

We recognise the importance of children and young people engaging positively with health and wellbeing issues at school. As Brian Whittle said, a young person being trained in CPR can help them to develop the skills that they may need in an emergency situation. He is also right to say that such training goes beyond gaining those skills and can help improve attainment more widely.

We welcome the British Heart Foundation’s nation of lifesavers campaign, which secured the commitment of all 32 local authorities to teach CPR in their secondary schools. We know that CPR awareness and skills development are already embedded in many primary and secondary schools

To assist education professionals, Save a Life for Scotland has worked with Education Scotland to develop resources for schools, which are available on Education Scotland’s glow website. That is delivering our aim of making learning about CPR easy, accessible and free.

Before I conclude, it is good to reflect that, when the out-of-hospital cardiac arrest strategy was launched in 2015, about one in 20 people survived to leave hospital after an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Since the introduction of the strategy, that has increased to one in 12, as Willie Coffey mentioned. That is a fantastic achievement. Clearly, we can go beyond that, which is what we all want, and making defibrillators more accessible across Scotland is a major part of achieving that.

I thank all the members in the chamber, especially those with a particular interest in this area, and everyone across Scotland for their hard work in improving the outcomes for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.