Hansard

I congratulate Jenni Minto on bringing this important debate to the chamber. I agree whole-heartedly with her motion, as public access to defibrillators has become one of the biggest constituency matters that I have ever dealt with.

In 2017, I met a local woman, Kathleen Orr, whose son Jayden tragically died following a cardiac arrest. In her evidence to the Public Petitions Committee in 2018, she said:

“Jayden went skating in the morning, as usual, and to his normal skate club in the evening. While he was doing his normal skate routine, he collapsed on the ice and never got back up again. That was when my world fell apart ... I do not remember too much after that, but I know that there were a lot of members of staff and not one of them knew what the others were doing. To my knowledge, there was a defibrillator, but none of the staff used it because they were not fully trained and were scared of doing so.”—[Official Report, Public Petitions Committee, 22 November 2018; c 1.]

Kathleen was giving evidence after lodging her petition to make it a legal requirement to have a public access defibrillator placed in all new buildings over a certain size; that is the option 1 that Jenni Minto outlined earlier. I have got to know Kathleen on her mission to increase the number of defibrillators across Inverclyde. When she started her charity in memory of Jayden, which is affectionately called Jayden’s Rainbow, there were only four automated external defibrillators in Inverclyde. Today, there are 41, including two at Ferguson Marine in Port Glasgow—one on each of the two ships that are being built. If it were not for Covid, there would already be more across the constituency.

Following discussions with Kathleen, I brought local and national stakeholders together to help to increase AED provision across Inverclyde and Scotland. St Andrew’s First Aid was so impressed with Kathleen’s work that it gifted her 30 of its old AEDs, which were then reconditioned. She is placing those AEDs across Inverclyde, in addition to those that she has given to local schools, which have been purchased through her campaigning and fundraising efforts.

Kathleen, her daughter Kerri and her son Declan all now volunteer with St Andrew’s First Aid. As well as improving access to AEDs, they want to show everyone that we should not be afraid of AEDs—in fact, they are foolproof, and they will not work unless someone has a shockable heart rhythm.

According to St Andrew’s First Aid, people from the most deprived areas are 43 per cent less likely to survive a cardiac arrest. Given Inverclyde’s challenges with deprivation, Kathleen’s efforts have become all the more significant when we acknowledge that statistic.

In the past few years, there has been a real awakening to the need to increase access to AEDs, and to the importance of having a record of where they all are. That is why the work of the British Heart Foundation, in partnership with the Scottish Ambulance Service, the NHS and Microsoft, in establishing the Circuit, Scotland’s first network of defibrillators, is vital.

The British Heart Foundation provided a helpful briefing for the debate and I will highlight three key points from it. First, performing CPR can more than double the chances of survival in some cases. Secondly, every minute without CPR and defibrillation reduces the chance of survival by up to 10 per cent.

The third point is that the ambulance services currently do not know where tens of thousands of defibrillators are. Knowing a defibrillator’s location can be the difference between life and death. Owning a defib is great but, if nobody knows where it is, that life-saving machine could be lying dormant in an emergency. I appeal to anyone who is watching the debate or who reads the Official Report after it to register their AED with the Circuit.