Mike Murray

OBRA has 2 Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs). During CX season one
of these has been traveling with the finish line camera and equipment.
During the summer the plan changes to having 1 resident at PIR and 1 at
the velodrome. Occasionally one of these might go to a criterium. For
those interested in the rationale for this plan please read on.

These devices are designed to be placed by minimally trained or untrained
members of the general public on people who have collapsed and who
unconscious, have no pulse and are not breathing. Generally they are not
useful for people that are pulseless and unconscious after trauma.
Thankfully non-traumatic sudden cardiac arrests are pretty uncommon for
people attending OBRA events. To my knowledge there have only been 2 cases
at OBRA events since 1980. Both of these have been at PIR. This works out
to about what you would expect given the rate of sudden cardiac death in
the group that attends OBRA races and the number of people that attend;
about 1 use about every 10-20 years. In order for these devices to be
useful they have to be applied to the person as soon as possible after
they collapse. The success of defibrillation drops off rapidly with time
after arrest, becoming near zero after 10 minutes or so. Given this, it is
very unlikely that a single AED is going to be useful at any race where
the response time to the collapsed person is going to be over 10 minutes;
i.e. most road and mountain bike events. The medical literature supports
the idea that the most utility in AED deployment is to place them where
they will be close to large numbers of people as opposed to smaller
numbers of higher risk people. AEDs are relatively expensive making
deployment of a larger number of them in a low risk setting like OBRA
events economically challenging.

Mike Murray