St John Scotland has announced a new project to help put defibrillators in every town and village in Scotland.  A agreement is in place with the Scottish Golf Union and the Scottish Ladies Golf Association to provide a defibrillator to selected golf clubs around Scotland and to help others obtain their own.  In addition, St John Scotland is trying to identify other places in Scotland where the provision of this life saving equipment will make a difference.  These will be locations where  large numbers of people congregate or pass through regularly.

Defibrillation is one crucial stage in a sequence of events that need to occur for the resuscitation of a victim of sudden cardiac arrest(SCA).This sequence, or ‘chain of survival’, starts by summoning the emergency services as soon as possible. The second stage is providing basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation (chest compressions alternated with rescue breaths) to keep the victim alive until the third stage (defibrillation) can be performed.

The automated external defibrillator (AED) has been described as the single most important development in the treatment of SCA. These devices are now widely available and increasingly used by people, often with little or no training, to re-start the heart of a victim of SCA. Under ideal circumstances, when used very soon after collapse (within two or three minutes), many can survive.