 
Drs Laurence d’Amours, Daniel Negreanu and Valérie Homier |
On December 23rd was published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology Open the first descriptive study on public automated external defibrillator (AED) registries in Canada. Drs Laurence d’Amours and Daniel Negreanu conceptualized and executed this innovative project. Following their involvement in the Foundation’s AED Project as Coordinator and Assistant Coordinator (2017-2018), Laurence and Daniel wished to characterize the Canadian public AED registry landscape. Their hypothesis was that the registries would differ regarding governance and operations, highlighting an opportunity to optimize and harmonize registry utility in order to improve access to these life-saving devices. Dr Valérie Homier, Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at McGill University, supervised and guided the two residents from project conception in 2018 to final publication in 2020. The project was presented at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress, held virtually in October 2020, and was awarded the Resuscitation Grant of the Jacques-de Champlain Foundation and the Quebec Association of Emergency Physicians. |
“Nine of 10 Canadian provinces have an AED registry; they differ with regards to their management, content, and quality assurance processes,” explains Dr. Laurence d’Amours, internal medicine resident at Université Laval. “We shed light on the significant heterogeneity between registries, as well as their particular characteristics.”
Number of AEDs registered by province (per 100,000 persons)
“I hope that our findings will be integrated by governments and health networks to improve the standard of Canadian AED Registries and make AED registration a legal obligation,” adds Dr. Daniel Negreanu, internal medicine resident at the Jewish General Hospital. “Ultimately, I am confident that our work will be used by Canadian provinces to ultimately save lives!”
As things currently stand, only Manitoba, British Columbia and Ontario have respective provincial laws that regulate AED accessibility in public spaces. There is currently no such law in Quebec. In 2015, the Jacques-de Champlain Foundation took matters into its own hands and created Quebec’s provincial public AED registry, which can be downloaded and accessed for free via the AED-Quebec mobile application. The Foundation has ever since continued advocating for the provincial government to follow suit with other provinces and legislate on public access defibrillation as soon as possible.
The Foundation is pleased to have supported this research project which expands knowledge on public access defibrillation and hopefully will help save more lives from cardiac arrest!