B.C. to test life-saving phone-app alert system

It happens in hockey arenas, airports, amusement parks and churches — a cardiac-arrest victim clutches their chest and falls to the ground, their fate decided by how fast help arrives.

B.C. Emergency Health Services is hoping to expand the pool of potential lifesavers with the launch of a phone app called PulsePoint. B.C. is the first to test a provincewide program for the public-notification service.

The app is connected to the emergency dispatch system. Neil Lilley, senior provincial executive director of patient-care communications and planning for B.C. Emergency Health Services, said an alert is sent out as soon as 911 dispatchers select the diagnosis on their computer screens.

App users who have said they are trained in CPR and are within 400 metres of the victim receive the message, which also includes a map of nearby defibrillators.

Just one in 10 people survive a cardiac arrest when it occurs outside of a hospital, according to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada.

Cardiac arrest is when the heart suddenly stops beating normally and cannot pump blood to the rest of the body. It leaves patients unconscious. Without immediate help, a victim of sudden cardiac arrest will suffer brain damage within three minutes, according to BCEHS.

However, survival of such an event doubles when CPR is used with an automated external defibrillator in the first few minutes, according to the foundation.

Traditionally, bystanders untrained in CPR are advised to call 911 when witnessing a cardiac arrest, yell out for a defibrillator, and then push hard and fast in the centre of the victim’s chest, using a defibrillator as soon as it arrives.

Dispatchers are trained to direct untrained individuals on how to deliver the possible life-saving method, Lilley said.

The app is used in Kingston and Toronto in Ontario and various U.S. cities, including Seattle. There, the app has been a success, increasing bystander CPR response to 50 and 60 per cent, Lilley said. In B.C., the bystander response rate is 25 per cent.

Lilley said when the app was launched after years of working on the implementation, 2,500 people downloaded and followed the service.

“We instantly had 2,500 people download and search and follow us,” he said. “That’s remarkable in the first day. If we can just keep up that momentum … we have the chance of more people’s lives being saved as a result.”