20/09/2026
Did you know you could help save a life by learning to do CPR and becoming a Goodsam Responder in Scotland? Search google for ‘Goodsam Responder Scotland’ and have a look on the ‘Save a Life for Scotland’ website.
Additionally our responders can and do elect to attend cardiac arrests and other life threatening emergencies likely to develop into Cardiac Arrests within a 6 mile radius of where they are in the country at any given moment! ❤️
When someone's heart stops outside a hospital, the clock that matters is very short, and every minute without chest compressions costs a meaningful share of the chance of survival. Ambulance response times in a well-run city are measured in single-digit minutes. That sounds fast until you set it against a brain that is already without oxygen.
The conventional way to attack this problem is to make the ambulance faster, and there is a limit to how far that can go in traffic. Sweden approached it from the other direction by asking who is already close enough to help, then building the machinery to find that person in the seconds after the call comes in.
Thousands of CPR-trained volunteers are registered through a smartphone app, so when a dispatch center takes a call suggesting cardiac arrest, the system alerts the ones nearby at the same moment it sends the ambulance. They receive the location and go on foot, and the design assumes they will divide the work. Some head directly to the patient while others route past the nearest publicly mounted defibrillator and bring it with them.
The evidence behind it is unusually good for this kind of intervention, because it was tested properly. A randomized trial in Stockholm found that bystander CPR was performed in 62 percent of cases where volunteers were dispatched, against 48 percent where they were not. That is a large difference in a setting where small differences save lives.
Program data from 2019 showed volunteers arriving before the ambulance in 46 percent of suspected cardiac arrests in Stockholm. In nearly half of cases, someone was already doing compressions or applying a defibrillator when the professionals walked in. The system started as an SMS network before moving to a smartphone platform, and comparable volunteer responder schemes have since been introduced in Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
