Gender and location disparities in prehospital bystander AED usage

Background: With bystander AED usage being critical for prehospital cardiac arrest patient outcomes, it is important to analyze if the gender and location disparities found in bystander CPR rates also exist for bystander AED usage.

Methods: Using the National Emergency Medical Services Information System (NEMSIS) database, 1,144,969 bystander AED cases were analyzed on the basis of gender and location. Chi-squared testing checked for statistical significance and effect size was measured using relative risk (RR).

Results: Using female patients as a baseline, the RR for bystander AED usage for male patients was 1.34 (95% CI [1.3310, 1.3557], p < 0.001) indicating male patients are 34% more likely to receive bystander AED usage compared to female patients. Analyzing bystander AED usage per urbanity region using urban patients as a baseline, resulted in a RR of 0.87 for suburban patients (95% CI [0.8572, 0.8833], p < 0.001), 0.39 for rural patients (95% CI [0.3849, 0.3971], p < 0.001), and 0.36 for frontier patients (95% CI [0.3515, 0.3726], p < 0.001) showing a sharp decline in the chance of bystander AED usage in rural and frontier areas.

Conclusions: Female patients are less likely to receive bystander AED usage compared to male patients. To resolve these disparities increased public awareness is necessary that supports AED usage on females as socially acceptable and necessary for patient outcomes. Furthermore, given bystander AED usage among males and females declined as cardiac arrest locations became more remote, improvements in rural and frontier AED availability and training are necessary to increase bystander AED usage rates in those regions.