Canada is Relying on you to Sue .... for the lack of an AED

If you have lost a loved one to Sudden Cardiac Arrest anywhere in Canada, anytime in the last two years and the event occurred at a location where common sense dictates it would have been reasonable to place an Automated External Defibrillator (AED), please speak to a lawyer about the possibility of a lawsuit. I am asking this as favour on behalf of all Canadians especially the thousands of families that will lose a loved one in preventable circumstances this year and next year and every year until we maximize the potential of Public Access Defibrillation (PAD) programs.

Momentum for effective PAD programs has built so slowly across Canada that for nearly a decade I’ve been hoping for a good cathartic lawsuit, one that would cleanse the blockage that is preventing so many senior decision makers in so many areas of Canadian life from committing to placing AED’s in all of the locations over which they have influence.  The excuses I’ve heard range from liability (arising from improper or unsuccessful deployment), to cost, to simply denying any corporate responsibility for responding to people in distress.  The only way Canadian communities are going to realize the full life saving potential of PAD programs is if families that have lost a loved one to Sudden Cardiac Arrest, in locations where an AED should reasonably have been placed, sue the property owner and stick with the lawsuit right through to a court ordered settlement. There have been out of court settlements, but typically these come with a gag order and the real story is never told in a public forum.

If you are a member of the enormous cohort of Canadians that have lost a loved one that could realistically have been saved by a well-placed AED winning a lawsuit will not make you whole. Hopefully a large settlement provides some level of comfort and financial security for your family. Hopefully the size of your settlement causes corporate and government decision makers to consider that it may be more cost effective to buy a handful of $1,400 AED’s as opposed to facing the alternative, defending a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Hopefully your family will take great comfort in knowing that your tragic loss  paved the way for families that follow to celebrate a life saved.

In 1999 I sold my first AED to a private golf club near Toronto. The event was newsworthy enough that it made the front page of Canada’s largest newspaper – above the fold. I naively thought that within five or six years AED’s would become as ubiquitous as coffee shops named after hockey players. Nearly 15 years on we are still fighting to get AED’s placed in the obvious frontline locations such as schools, shopping centres, big box stores, fitness clubs and golf courses. Building deeply rooted community cardiovascular emergency response programs and achieving thirty to forty per cent improvement in survival rates, is still just a vision on the far horizon. This despite the overwhelming evidence that AED’s, combined with new CPR protocols, do nothing but save lives and dramatically improve survival rates for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and despite the fact that AED’s have come down in price from $5,600 in 1999 to $1,400 in 2014. Organizations that have implemented effective PAD programs already have done it because their moral compass guided them in the right direction. Those organizations that have not committed to preventing sudden cardiac death on their properties , including dozens of school boards, might benefit from a good cathartic lawsuit.