HSJ Value Awards 2019: Technology initiative of the year

Winner

East Midlands Ambulance Service Trust and GoodSAM: Improving cardiac arrest survival with crowd-sourced CPR

East Midlands Ambulance Service Trust introduced a GoodSAM app which allowed it to alert 2,000 people trained in CPR if there was an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest close to them. In doing so, it reduced the response time between call and the start of CPR and defibrillation from seven minutes to three.

In 18 months, it issued 22,000 alerts, each going to the nearest five responders, with 16,000 finding a responder who administered treatment to the patient. Spontaneous return of circulation was achieved in 40 cases and seven people survived to be released from hospital.

Introducing the system involved reassuring IT staff around the integration of the app into 999 “command and control” software and a rethink of risk and clinical governance appetites.

Use of the app is being extended to working with police forces to respond to critical haemorrhages after violent assault and using geolocation with tasks such as allocating  4 by 4 drivers to transport staff in winter.

Read a detailed case study about this project at HSJ Solutions