Essex-Windsor EMS is making progress in finding the location of every automatic external defibrillator across the region.
In mid-April, EMS officials issued a call to the public to help locate and map out all the AEDs in the region in an effort to make sure they were in working order and to get more installed in public and work spaces.
Essex-Windsor EMS Chief Justin Lammers says they're not where they need to be or want to be, but they are doing better.
"We are seeing an uptick from the public. Our team is working hard to get out there and identify the AEDs in the community, the Public Access Defibrillators. We're sitting at just over 600 currently."
When the campaign started, there were around 550 registered defibrillators, but its estimated there could be as many as 1,000 across the area.
Lammers notes there were some duplicates in data they started the campaign with and they were able to clean all those out to get to the figure they have now.
As part of the effort to locate every AED across the region, the public is encouraged to download a smartphone app called PulsePoint and use it to map and register any defibrillators they find in a public space or at a business.
The uploads are then authenticated by PulsePoint, shared with the Windsor Central Ambulance Communications Centre so their location can be quickly conveyed in the event of an emergency, and then shared with the 911 caller.
Lammers says they need bystander CPR and they need to know where the Public Access Defibrillators are so people can use them.
"Even in a perfect system, from the point of someone suffering a cardiac arrest to somebody calling 9-1-1 to dispatching the ambulance to us getting there, in a perfect system, six to eight minutes, hopefully less than that in us getting there," he says. "There is a 10 percent per minute decrease in survivability, so that could be 60 to 80 percent."
Survival rates following instances of sudden cardiac arrest improve dramatically if a shock from a defibrillator is received within three minutes of collapse and decrease every minute after that.
According to Essex-Windsor EMS, bystander CPR was conducted on 161 occasions in 2023, but a PAD was only used in 11 of those cases.
Click here to find more information about the PulsePoint app and AEDs on the County of Essex website.
