Nearly a third of the 500,000 cardiac defibrillators present on French territory do not work according to an audit carried out by a maintenance company and communicated to franceinfo. These machines are present in public or private spaces, whether train stations, town halls, businesses or the street.
The Matecir Defibril company inspected 6,021 defibrillators between 2021 and 2023. According to its projections, nearly a third of the 500,000 defibrillators installed in France are out of service.
Obligation to ensure its proper functioning
Establishments open to the public are required to install a defibrillator but, according to franceinfo, they often do not know that they must ensure its proper functioning, for example by changing the batteries and the electrodes.
To avoid this decline, Arlod, the association for the census and location of defibrillators, is calling for a law aimed at obliging operators to ensure the proper functioning of defibrillators. According to data from the Pasteur Institute of Lille on heart failuremyocardial infarction or “heart attack” is the cause of around 18,000 deaths per year in France, or 10% of total deaths in the country.