CUMBRIANS who know the whereabouts of life-saving defibrillators are being urged to disclose their location to North West ambulance bosses to help save more lives.

Groups and organisations in possession of the equipment, which is used to treat people who are in cardiac arrest, can have the location listed on a national defibrillator database.

It is being compiled by the NHS, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and Microsoft and the move has been welcomed by the region’s ambulance service.

The aim is to map the life-saving devices so they can be made readily available for every out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the UK.

Defibrillators are small machines which can ‘shock’ a person’s heart into restarting after a cardiac arrest. If this can be done in the first few minutes, patients have a 60-70 per cent chance of making a full recovery.

They are easy to use, easy to carry and they won’t deliver a shock unless it is required. There is no clinical training required to be able to use the machine.

North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) already holds a list of defibrillators but estimates there are thousands that remain unknown and hidden in businesses, hotel chains, factories, shopping centres and smaller organisations such as social and sports clubs and schools.

The BHF states that public access defibrillators are used in less than three per cent of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, significantly reducing the survival chances of tens of thousands of people every year.

NWAS community engagement manager Andrew Redgrave said: “The use of CPR and public defibrillators can mean the difference between life and death for a patient in cardiac arrest.

“Defibrillators allow everyday members of the public to become lifesavers by providing the all-important shock before our ambulance crews arrive. Even just two or three minutes earlier can make a huge difference.

“We know that many people raise funds in their local area to have defibrillators installed but they often forget to tell us they’ve done so. This means that we could get a call for a suspected cardiac arrest where this potentially life-saving piece of kit is available and we can’t tell the caller to go and get it.

“The more defibrillators we know about, the more lives will be saved. It’s that simple.”

The national defibrillator database will launch in spring 2019, but defibrillator 'guardians' in Cumbria can register them now at nwas.nhs.uk