An app that swiftly sends CPR volunteers to heart attack sufferers in Denmark

We have a similar system in the Netherlands, only it doesn't use an app. When reporting a heart attack, the emergency response service will dispatch two ambulances and activate the system to summon volunteers that live or work nearby. I believe they get a robot call as well as sms text instructions. Half the volunteers get instructions to pick up a specific AED somewhere first, the other half is instructed to rush to the victim immediately.

I've had the misfortune to gather some anecdotal experience with this system in the past year. In both cases, 4 volunteers showed up very quickly, well before the first ambulance (which in both cases showed up within the allotted 15 minutes of the emergency call). One of the victims was my father in law, who is alive and well today, most likely thanks to the volunteers. Unfortunately, the other one -a friend- was not so lucky.

Anecdote: Three runners showed up in minutes at 4am when someone on my street suffered a cardiac arrest, beating the ambulance by +5 minutes.

There are so many ways to be cynical about the 4% to 16% improvement, but I think this is the most important takeaway:

> “The patient is dead” — meaning his or heart has stopped due to cardiac arrest — “and if you don’t do anything, 9 out of 10 will be dead forever,” he said.

I responded to one of these a year or so ago quite quickly, and EMTs beat me to the scene. Denmark does a really good job of distributing AEDs around neighborhoods, so I think the theory is just to stack up on response opportunities at the moment of a credible alert for better outcomes.

GoodSAM, a similar app for alerting responders to heart-attacks in the UK, was used to coordinate volunteers during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. Vulnerable people who could not go out to buy groceries for themselves, people dealing with health issues while isolating, etc. were connected with those who could help them. I really believe this kind of infrastructure is a genuine public good, for more reasons than just heart attack response times.

Another thing to note here: When people take a driving licence in Denmark, a CPR certification is mandatory. So a lot of people in Denmark has CPR training, myself included.

That has got to be the best idea for an app I've seen it years.

There is an app that already does this (among a few other emergency services related things) in the US - PulsePoint. I can sign up for nearby CPR needed alerts, and be shown on a map where AEDs are.

I believe it was brought up when I took my last CPR certification 4 years ago, so it’s not exactly new.

There is another solution already heavily in us across the UK, US and Australia: https://www.goodsamapp.org/

According to their homepage, 1.5m users globally.

It is weird seeing the word CPR in the same sentence as Denmark when not talking about our SSN (which the most common use of "cpr" in Danish, it is short for central person register)..

On a more on-topic note, we have a hell of a lot of the AED devices all around (at least here in the capital). I am within 100 meters of a (public) device at most of my waking hours (most are privately owned by businesses and associations like my home-owner's assoc).