Drone delivers defibrillators for cardiac arrest faster than ambulance

Drones delivering defibrillators consistently outperform ambulances in the race to get life-saving treatment to people who have experienced heart failure, according to a landmark new trial in Sweden. Time is critical when it comes to reviving patients who have gone into cardiac arrest. Using a defibrillator to apply an electrical shock to a heart within 3 to 5 minutes of it stopping can lead to survival rates of up to 70 per cent. Yet fewer than 2 per cent of patients receive such treatment before emergency services arrive, with each minute of delay after the patient's heart has stopped reducing the probability of survival by 10 per cent. To see whether drones could cut the time taken to get defibrillators to collapsed patients, Andreas Claesson at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and his colleagues launched a collaborative project with drone operator Everdrone and emergency services in western Sweden where drones and ambulances were dispatched to each suspected case of cardiac arrest. Across the 55 cases, drones were quicker than ambulances 67 per cent of the time, and by an average of 3 minutes and 14 seconds.