Defibrillators

Part of 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:49 pm on 27 June 2018.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 2:49, 27 June 2018

Thank you for the question. Funnily enough, I was recently in a place within my own constituency where somebody who had been motivated by their own experience of the health service had gone out and raised money to provide defibrillators—one in the new Eastern High school recently opened in Trowbridge, and the other, recently, in Llanrumney's Phoenix Boxing Club. And so, there are a range of people who are deeply committed to doing this, and equally, within the charitable sector, there's a wide range of charities that are committed to making more defibrillators available and making sure that they're publicly available, and it's the partnership with WAST that helps to make sure those public-access defibrillators are available and for use.

So, the challenge always is about how many, and where and when, and also where the role of Government is in terms of making those available. The UK Government recently announced a fund of money. We haven't seen a consequential for that, but we need to think again about how we make sure that we do continue to see more defibrillators used and, indeed, how that links to the out-of-hospital cardiac arrest plan to make sure that this relatively easy-to-use life-saving equipment is not just available but is actually used to help save people's lives.