Pediatric and adult Out-of-Hospital cardiac arrest incidence within and near public schools in British Columbia: Missed opportunities for Systematic AED deployment strategies

Systematic automated external defibrillator(AED) placement in schools may improve pediatric out-of-hospital cardiac arrest(OHCA) survival. To estimate their utility, we identified school-located pediatric and adult OHCAs to estimate the potential utilization of school-located AEDs. Further, we identified all OHCAs within an AED-retrievable distance of the school by walking, biking, and driving. We used prospectively collected data from the British Columbia(BC) Cardiac Arrest Registry(2013–2020), and geo-plotted all OHCAs and schools(n = 824) in BC. We identified adult and pediatric(age