There is no doubt that it’s been a long hot summer with most of us enjoying the warmth, living life to the full. It is perhaps strange for me to talk about death, but the reason for that is to get you to think about saving lives.

Previous articles have spoken about the importance of carrying out chest compressions or CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation). Where a patient suffers a cardiac arrest, every second counts.

For every minute after the heart stops beating not doing CPR reduces their chance of survival by 10 per cent! CPR buys the patient time; time to get a defibrillator to the scene to shock the heart so that it can ‘reset’ itself and start beating again.

Across the West Midlands, we know where over 4,000 public access defibs are but there could be hundreds more. We’ve heard of businesses like a dentist that hadn’t registered theirs with us. We want to change that. Given how important early defibrillation is to a patient surviving, it’s vital that we know where they all are.

That’s why we’re delighted to be working with the British Heart Foundation to map as many as possible and make as many of them available to the public.

Staggeringly, public access defibrillators are only used in about three per cent of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, significantly reducing the survival chances of tens of thousands of people every year. We need to change that and having an easily accessible mapping system that anyone can access could save literally thousands of lives each year.

As a paramedic I can tell you the value of having a bystander starting CPR immediately. It’s often lifesaving. I also know that rapidly getting a defibrillator to the scene with someone prepared to use it is in many ways more important still.

In the spring we will be opening a database where you can register a defib if you have one.

It’s absolutely critical that we’re able to direct cardiac arrest bystanders to their nearest defibrillator. This gives patients the best possible chance of receiving early defibrillation prior to the ambulance arriving.