Cardioprotected taxis, with defibrillator, in Madrid and Barcelona

Imagine that someone has a cardiac arrest in the middle of the street. Call 112, the emergency room, and wait for the ambulance to arrive. All of this is minutes, and for every minute the hope that the person will survive is lost.

Now a project is born that will shorten the time of first aid, since some taxis in Barcelona, ​​and soon also in Madrid, will have a defibrillator inside, with a taxi driver who has been trained to perform the aid.

This is how they presented it today at the Barcelona City Council. I tell you about it in this video:

At the moment there are 30 “cardioprotected” taxis with a defibrillator. These taxis are geographically located, and when an emergency occurs, the closest one will be notified. At that moment, the taxi driver will inform the passenger that he will have to attend to the emergency (he will notify another taxi to take charge of the trip in progress), and will run to the place where the person has cardiac arrest.

The system is an initiative of the Barcelona Salud Foundation, SOS Taxi, the Sistema d’Emergències Mèdiques (SEM), the Barcelona City Council and Huawei, and is connected to the 112 system so that everything happens as quickly as possible.

This July the test will begin, which will last between 18 and 24 months. At the moment 30 volunteer taxi drivers are collaborating, and 20 more are expected in September, only in the city of the Barcelona metropolitan area. We still don’t know the numbers in Madrid.

In order for the service to be possible, they will use an application called “Fast Responders”, linked to 061. From there the taxi driver will receive the notification and the place to which he will have to go. Although the application will offer the possibility of ignoring the warning, the volunteers have promised not to do so, since there is a defined protocol of what they will have to do at all times, including the cancellation of the trip with a passenger that is being made ( unless it is a trip where a human life is also in danger).

In addition to the third deputy mayor, Laia Bonet, the vice president of Huawei Spain, Therese Jamaa, participated in the presentation, demonstrating once again how technology can help save lives every day.