• ELENA L. VILLALVILLA

    Madrid

    @elenalpzv

  • NACHO MARTIN

    Madrid

    @NachoMartin_

  • JUAN C. SANCHEZ

    Madrid

    @_JuanCsanchez_

Updated Sunday, January 1, 2023-23:09

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The difference between having a defibrillator or not can also be the difference between life and death.

According to the latest report from the Spanish Society of Cardiology and the Spanish Heart Foundation, every year

35,000 cases of sudden death

occur in Spain .

This means that approximately

every 15 minutes

an apparently healthy person dies unexpectedly and suddenly.

In Spain, the chances of surviving a cardiac arrest on the street range between 5% and 10%, and for every minute that passes, the options decrease by 10%.

After ten minutes the chances of survival are minimal.

These figures show the extreme importance of having a defibrillator nearby when such a situation occurs.

Last September at the Cádiz-Barcelona match, held in the capital of Cádiz, a spectator suffered a heart attack in the stands of the Nuevo Mirandilla stadium.

A second defibrillator provided by the Barcelona bench was needed to keep him alive until he was transferred to a hospital.

Every second counts.

Back in 2011, the Planta Cara al Infarto Campaign highlighted the need to install defibrillators in public places.

Six years later, the Community of Madrid made it mandatory.

Using one of these devices on time

increases the chances of a person surviving by up to 80%

if they are revived in the first minute.

When is it advisable to use them?

"It is for when someone is unconscious, and neither responds nor breathes but has a pulse," explains Carmen Medina, a nurse at the Rey Juan Carlos University Hospital in Madrid.

Therefore, defibrillators are useful when two types of cardiac arrhythmias occur:

ventricular fibrillation (VF) and pulseless ventricular tachycardia.

.

Even so, it is estimated that ventricular fibrillation is responsible for 85% of cardiac arrests outside the hospital.

According to official data from the Transparency Portal, in the Community of Madrid there are

8,449 defibrillators outside the health field

.

Based on this information, EL MUNDO has carried out a manual review to verify where each one is located exactly.

In those cases in which there is more than one defibrillator in the same location (such as in the EMT bus parking lot in Hortaleza, where there is a device in each vehicle), it has been decided to group all the defibrillators in the same location. , and thus avoid duplications.


The final result is that the 8,449 defibrillators that the Community of Madrid has registered are located in

5,469 points

in the region.

In this way, the number of defibrillators per person in Madrid stands at

one for every 789 inhabitants

, according to the data from this registry.

Only in the capital there are four for every square kilometer.

By sectors,

educational centers

are the places that have the most defibrillators.

In total,

33%

of those located outside the health field in the Community of Madrid are in nursery schools, schools, institutes and universities, both public and private.

In second place is the Other category, which has 22% of these devices, and within which establishments of a different nature are included, such as companies and businesses, organizations, workplaces, industrial estates or addresses whose establishments are not specified. with precision.

Points belonging to the

Public Administration

are the third category with the most defibrillators, with 13% of the total.

This is followed by workplaces with more than 250 workers (10%) and sports facilities (7%).

Transport facilities account for 6% of those 5,469, which include the Madrid Municipal Transport Company (EMT), Madrid Metro and Renfe stations.

The Metro network alone has 317 teams distributed between stations and work centers since 2021, according to official data.

This number is higher than that set by the regulations, which requires that all stations with an influx of more than 5,000 daily travelers have defibrillators.

"The purpose of having defibrillators throughout the public transport network is to be able to save lives, because they allow immediate care in the event of a cardiorespiratory arrest that a traveler may suffer, significantly increasing their survival expectations and reducing subsequent sequelae," he assured. the Minister of Transport, David Pérez, as reported by Europa Press last October.

However, the

European Resuscitation Council (ERC)

estimates that out of every 10 Spaniards

only three know how to perform

cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

Despite the fact that the Community of Madrid establishes in its regulations that defibrillators can be automatic and semi-automatic, the importance of helping to save a life also lies in knowing how they work, something that the majority of the population is unaware of.

"The difference between the two is that it is the first to discharge alone when it detects the rate at which the download can be performed, while the semi-automatic, also called DESA, you see the rate at which the download can be performed on the monitor Medina explains.

They are designed so that anyone, regardless of whether they have experience in the health field or not, can use them until the emergency services arrive.

"There is a card that explains how it works," adds Medina.

This newspaper has contacted the Department of Health of all the autonomous communities so that they will detail the number of defibrillators that each region has.

As in this case the comparison at the state level has not been made on the number of locations that have a defibrillator, but on the total number of defibrillators that are outside the health area in each autonomous community, in the case of the Community of Madrid has used the figure of 8,449, which are those that appear in the official registry.

For this report, the data has been sent by the autonomous communities between the months of October and November, while the data for the Community of Madrid was obtained in October 2022.

WHAT THE REGULATION SAYS

In our country, although the Ministry of Health and Consumption regulated in 2009 through a Royal Decree the safety and quality conditions necessary for the installation of defibrillators, the competence to implant them outside the health field is autonomous.

So during the past decade most communities have been approving a legal framework in this regard.

In the Community of Madrid, large

commercial establishments with a surface area of ​​more than 2,500 m2

are obliged to install a defibrillator for external use ;

the

airports

;

transportation

facilities

;

public

establishments

with a capacity equal to or greater than 2,000 people;

the establishments dependent on the

Public Administrations

;

sports

facilities, centers or complexes

with more than 500 daily users;

hotel

establishments

with more than 100 beds;

educational

centers

;

Work

centers

with more than 250 workers and

residential centers

for the elderly with 200 beds.

In addition, public and private entities and individuals can install one voluntarily, previously notifying "the health authority through a responsible declaration".

Likewise, the change of ownership, location or any other substantial variation, including its withdrawal, must be communicated in the same way.

The Madrid regulations on defibrillators were approved at the end of 2016, and from the following year they began to be installed throughout the region.

Since then the regional government has been updating a record with the number of times these devices have been used each year.

In total, until September 28, 2022, used

.

And although the annual average is 32 uses, the figures are very different (the first year they were only used once, while in 2019, the year that they were used the most, there were a total of 63 uses).

Sources from the Ministry of Health clarify that these data do not mean that after each use there has necessarily been health care, because in a small percentage some use alerts are triggered by mistake.

And, of course, in the cases in which health care did occur, it does not mean that it was finally able to save the patient's life.

METHODOLOGY

The data has been extracted from the dataset provided by the Community of Madrid, which is available on the regional open data portal, downloaded in October.

Said database specifies the location of the different defibrillators by municipality, address, place where they are placed inside the building and the coordinates, as well as other information of interest such as the type of establishment and its ownership (public or private). , zip code or time.

In order to know the places where they are installed and not the total number of defibrillators, (which are 8,449), a manual review of all the locations on the map has been made, grouping those that belonged to the same point to avoid duplicates.

However, those in which the address (street and number) was identical have been maintained if it could be guaranteed that the defibrillators belonged to different centers.

If you know of the existence of any other defibrillator that is not included on the map, contact us via email infografia@elmundo.es specifying the exact address and we will add it.

María A. Bello has collaborated in this report

Writing:

Nacho Martín and Elena L. Villalvilla

Data processing:

Elena L. Villalvilla and Juan C. Sánchez

Visualization:

Juan C. Sánchez

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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