Andrew Powell
A bill requiring cardiac emergency response plans and automated external defibrillators (AEDs) on Florida’s school campuses will head to Gov. Ron DeSantis for his signature.
Hialeah Republican Rep. Alex Rizo and Clermont Republican Rep. Taylor Yarkosky sponsored the bill (HB 1607). During the bill’s passage through the House, Yarkosky detailed the stats on cardiac arrests in schools and how low the survival rate drops if an AED is not available.
“Sudden cardiac arrest is the No. 1 killer on school campuses. It equates to about four of our Florida youth dying every day from sudden cardiac arrests, or around 1,400 students in Florida,” Yarkosky said.
“The biggest ticking time bomb that we have is that 1 in every 300 of our youth in Florida — which is about 15,000 to 16,000 kids, if you do the math — has an underlying heart condition that they don’t know yet that will perhaps lead to one of these events.”
The American Heart Association praised the bill’s passing, stating that students, staff and visitors to every school in Florida will have access to immediate care if a sudden cardiac event were to unfold.
Under the bill, public schools, including charter schools, would need to have an on-site AED and an emergency response plan in place, and school personnel would receive training on how to act during a cardiac emergency.
Tiffany McCaskill Henderson, the American Heart Association’s Florida Government Relations Director, thanked Rizo, Yarkosky and Tallahassee Sen. Corey Simon, who sponsored a similar Senate companion bill (SB 430), for championing the legislation.
“Many Floridians with personal stories of surviving cardiac arrest advocated alongside us to educate legislators on the importance of this bill, and Florida’s legislators listened,” McCaskill Henderson said.
The American Heart Association noted in a statement that more than 356,000 people experience a cardiac arrest outside of a hospital setting every year in the U.S., and further detailed that the current survival rate is 10%. However, AEDs in schools can help 70% of children who have cardiac arrests survive.
