Women and people from ethnic and lower-class backgrounds may be less likely to survive a heart attack outside of hospital, according to a wide-ranging report. 

Less than one in 10 people in the UK survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest – a proportion lower than “comparable countries” – and a number of factors were found to reduce this rate even further for communities with limited access to defibrillators and a lack of CPR training.

The Every Second Counts report, published last year, also suggested that bystanders were less likely to come to the aid of women and provide life-saving support. 

The report has put forward a number of recommendations aimed at addressing ethnic, socio-economic, gender and geographical disparities in the survival rate from out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. 

Last month, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Defibrillators launched a National Call to Action and echoed one of the report’s recommendations.

The group, chaired by the Liberal Democrat parliamentarian Steve Darling, called on the Government to expand CPR training by mandating “age-appropriate first aid training in schools”. 

The MP for Torbay said: “By ensuring every child learns CPR and defibrillator use, we can create a generation equipped to save lives. The Government must seize this opportunity to make lifesaving education a reality.” 

Since 2022, the Department for Education has encouraged the roll-out of defibrillators in schools, especially near sports facilities, some of which are also rented out by community groups. 

Whether the defibrillators are made accessible to the wider public remains at each school’s discretion, although the Resuscitation Council has argued that more should place theirs in part of the premises that can be publicly accessible. 

The impact of the roll-out was highlighted during one recent incident involving Meadowhead School in Sheffield, when a defibrillator located there was taken to a nearby house where it was used on a patient. 

The school was also one among many which participated in the Restart A Heart campaign to increase survival rates among people who experience out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, and last month, the Resuscitation Council launched a petition to “ensure every student leaves school with CPR training”.

Kevin Elliott, Meadowhead School’s business manager, said: “An elderly gentleman had collapsed and needed the help from the defib. We sent a couple of our first aid trained staff who took the defib and supported the individual. 

“They stayed with him until the ambulance arrived. Luckily, he survived.”

Such instances were helped by registration drives to add defibrillator locations to The Circuit’s national database, so that ambulance crews can direct 999 callers to their nearest equipment.

Being predominantly located in residential areas, school-based defibrillators may go some way in addressing the imbalance identified in research, whereby devices are more likely to be located near urban workplaces with lower residential population density. 

Research published by the European Resuscitation Council also notes that the UK does not have a “clear strategy” on the location of defibrillators, and that many installations are the result of “local ad-hoc initiatives” and “somewhat arbitrary”. 

Data has also shown that the availability of defibrillators varies widely across the country, with the London borough of Waltham Forest hosting only four devices per 10,000 people, compared to the Outer Hebrides district of Na h-Eileanan Siar with an average of 56.3 defibrillators. 

It also highlighted that 38 per cent of the most deprived areas have no registered defibrillators at all, as is the case in 56 per cent of the areas where non-white ethnic groups make up a majority of inhabitants. 

That compares with 31 per cent of white-majority areas. 

Part of the strategy to narrow the health inequality gap is to bring defibrillators and CPR training to local community groups, including places of worship and sports clubs. 

The Community Grant Scheme is run by the Resuscitation Council and offers up to £1,500 for small organisations to teach about resuscitation in “underserved areas, where bystander CPR rates are lower, and cardiac arrest incidences are higher”.

One beneficiary of this was the Leeds-based charity, Purple Patch Arts, which put on a week-long programme of workshops last year to help tackle the “shortage of accessible information for learning-disabled people around cardiac emergencies”.

Project manager Hannah Greenwood explained how the grant “enabled us to develop our participants’ knowledge and confidence”, which was an area for improvement also highlighted in the 2024 report.

“Through body percussion, electric circuits and relay races, our participants learnt how the heart works and what causes a cardiac arrest,” she said.

“Participants sang along with ‘Help!’ by the Beatles to learn about calling for help, danced to songs which had the same beats per minute as recommended CPR compressions, and practiced deep breathing and mindfulness activities to remember to stay calm during an emergency.”