• Austin S Kilaru, Marc Leffer, John Perkner, Kate Flanigan Sawyer, Chandra E Jolley, Lindsay D Nadkarni, Frances S Shofer, and Raina M Merchant.
• From the Department of Emergency Medicine (Mr Kilaru, Ms Nadkarni, and Drs Shofer and Merchant), Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; and Federal Occupational Health (Drs Leffer, Perkner, and Sawyer and Ms Jolley), US Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, Md.
• J. Occup. Environ. Med. 2014 Jan 1;56(1):86-91.

ObjectiveFederal Occupational Health (FOH) administers a nationwide public access defibrillation program in US federal buildings. We describe the use of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) in federal buildings and evaluate survival after cardiac arrest.MethodsUsing the FOH database, we examined reported events in which an AED was brought to a medical emergency in federal buildings over a 14-year period, from 1999 to 2012.ResultsThere were 132 events involving an AED, 96 (73%) of which were due to cardiac arrest of cardiac etiology. Of 54 people who were witnessed to experience a cardiac arrest and presented with ventricular fibrillation or ventricular tachycardia, 21 (39%) survived to hospital discharge.ConclusionsPublic access defibrillation, along with protocols to install, maintain, and deploy AEDs and train first responders, benefits survival after cardiac arrest in the workplace.

27 keywords...

hide…