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Cardiac arrest
Bystander AEDs work — when someone actually grabs one
Bystander AED effectiveness despite low utilisation in OHCA
Prehospital Emergency Care · 2026-10-06 · Added 8 October 2026
Korean multicentre OHCA registry analysis estimating bystander AED effectiveness against a no-defibrillation reference — AED application was associated with outcomes comparable to or better than EMS shocks, but was applied in only a fraction of eligible cases, especially at home.
- Study type
- Registry
- Design
- Retrospective multicentre registry analysis with propensity and weighting methods
- Participants
- 23,918 adults with presumed medical OHCA (383 bystander AED applications)
- Main finding
- Bystander AED application was associated with higher survival (aOR 1.60) and good neurological outcome (aOR 2.31) versus no prehospital defibrillation, comparable to EMS-delivered shock; yet AEDs were applied in only 8.5% of public-area versus 1.9% of non-public opportunity cases
- Caveat
- Only 383 bystander AED cases in nearly a decade, all from a single country's registry — the estimates are imprecise and system-specific
- Bottom line
- Supports current practice
Why it matters in Australia (High relevance). Public-access AEDs are widespread in Australia but underused for the same reasons — this quantifies the cost of the deployment-utilisation gap rather than the devices themselves.
Learning goal
Strengthen my approach to promoting early bystander defibrillation when engaging communities about out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.
More
- Topic: Cardiac arrest
- Daily scan: 8 October 2026
- Podcast: Paramedic Papers Daily, 8 October 2026
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