“No law requires us to have one.” It is the most common thing people say when an AED program comes up, and it is usually true.
It is also the wrong question.
Whether a statute requires an AED tells you almost nothing about whether you will be judged ready when someone collapses in your building.
Two Different Questions
The first question is legal: does a mandate apply to us? The answer depends on your state, your industry, and your building. Many workplaces face no AED requirement at all. Some do, and the list is growing. Several New England states have passed school AED laws that take effect this school year, and Massachusetts now requires an AED at every assisted living residence.
The second question is the one that actually matters: if a person goes into sudden cardiac arrest here, what would a reasonable organization like ours have had in place? That is the question insurers ask when they underwrite you. It is the question auditors ask when they review you. And if the worst happens, it is the question a jury is asked to answer.
A mandate is a floor. It is the minimum a legislature could agree on. A standard of care is what people in your position, with your resources and your foot traffic, would reasonably be expected to do. The two are rarely the same thing, and the gap between them is where organizations get hurt.
Why the Floor Keeps Rising
Read any recent AED law and you will notice a pattern. The Massachusetts assisted living rules say each residence must have an AED and “ensure its proper upkeep.” School laws in Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire talk about placement, maintenance, and training. What they mostly do not do is define upkeep. They do not say who checks the pads, how often the battery is tested, or what records you keep.
So even when a mandate applies to you, you are handed the same job as everyone else: decide what readiness looks like and be able to prove it. Compliance gets you a device on the wall. It does not get you a device that works, and it does not get you a record that shows it worked.
That is why the organizations that treat the mandate as the finish line are the ones most surprised later. They did what the law said. They did not do what a reasonable organization would have done.
What Gets Asked Afterward
This is not legal advice, and your counsel should weigh in on your specific situation. But the questions asked after a cardiac event on a property are remarkably consistent, whether they come from an insurer, a regulator, or a plaintiff’s attorney.
Was there an AED on site? Was it within reach in the first few minutes? Was it working? Had anyone checked it, and can you show when? Were the pads and battery in date? Did anyone on shift know where it was and how to use it? Is there a written policy, and did anyone follow it?
Notice that “were you legally required to have one” is not on the list. Notice also that a device with no maintenance record answers most of those questions badly. Good Samaritan laws are written to protect the person who steps in to help. They are not written to protect an organization that let its equipment lapse. A written policy that nobody follows, and a device that nobody inspects, can be worse than no policy at all, because they show you knew what should happen and did not make sure it did.
The Math Does Not Care About the Statute
Here is the part that makes the mandate question feel small. The CDC reports more than 350,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the United States each year. Nearly 3 in 10 of them happen somewhere other than home, according to American Red Cross data. That means workplaces, schools, branches, restaurants, gyms, and lobbies.
Once cardiac arrest begins, survival drops roughly 10 percent for every minute without defibrillation. Research published in JAMA puts the average EMS response time at about 7 minutes. A person who waits that long has a 5 to 7 percent chance of surviving. With immediate defibrillation, that chance can reach as high as 60 percent.
None of those numbers change when you cross a state line into a place with a different law. The clock runs the same way in a mandated building and an unmandated one. That is the whole point.
Who Is Watching
There is one more audience that judges your readiness long before any incident, and it is your own staff. Gallup has found that employees who strongly feel their employer cares about their well-being are 69 percent less likely to be looking for a new job, five times more likely to trust their leadership, and three times more likely to be engaged at work.
Employees do not read statutes. They notice whether the AED on the wall looks maintained, whether anyone has ever mentioned it, and whether the company treats their safety as a real commitment or a box that was never required to be checked. A readiness program is one of the few safety investments that people can see every day.
Set Your Own Standard
No law requires your building to have air conditioning either. You have it because reasonable organizations do. AED readiness works the same way. The question is not what you are required to do. It is what you would want to have done.
If you are responsible for locations where employees and customers gather, see how a readiness standard works when one partner is accountable for every device. If your organization is thinking about what a defensible AED program should include, we are always happy to talk it through.
Life Support Systems has helped organizations stay ready for nearly 50 years, servicing devices in all 50 states from our home base in Boston. Our approach pairs our own technicians with the AEDTrack portal, so the device is maintained by a person and the proof is always on file.
Want to learn more? Click here to have a conversation with the Life Support Systems team.
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