Owning AEDs Is Not A Program: What A Factory Floor Save In Indiana Shows
A man went into cardiac arrest on a factory floor in Goshen, Indiana, and went home. Three things had to be true at once for that to happen, and the gap between owning an AED and running an AED program lives in exactly those three conditions.
What Happened at the Keystone RV Plant
WNDU reported on September 2, 2026, that Pat Moran, a long-time employee at the Keystone RV plant in Goshen, Indiana, went into sudden cardiac arrest during his shift. A coworker, Michelle Wolfe, found him collapsed. Coworkers started CPR immediately and brought the plant's on-site AED, delivering shocks until emergency responders arrived. Moran recovered. Dr. Blair MacPhail, an interventional cardiologist at Goshen Health, told the station that starting CPR immediately with an AED available triples the outcome for a patient in sudden cardiac arrest.
Read the sequence again, slowly, because every step in it was a condition that had to hold. The device was on site. Someone knew where it was. Someone was willing to use it. Take away any one of the three and the story ends differently — and none of the three happens by accident.
Why This Story Is the Cleanest Illustration Available
Most facilities that buy AEDs have the first condition covered: a device physically exists somewhere in the building. Far fewer can say, without checking, how many people on second shift know exactly where the nearest unit is, when its pads expire, or who is responsible for the monthly check. That gap — between owning the hardware and running the program around it — is exactly what separates a facility that gets lucky from one that's actually prepared. Goshen didn't get lucky. Three separate conditions were already in place before the emergency happened, and this is where each of them came from.
Condition One: The Device Is Present, Where It's Actually Needed
Owning an AED and having it in the right place are not the same fact. Coverage math starts with the floor plan: for a large manufacturing facility, what's the walking distance from the far corner of the floor, or from a second-shift work area, to the nearest device? A single AED mounted near the front office does close to nothing for a crew working a hundred yards away in a back bay.
The entrances and pathways people actually use matter as much as square footage. A facility with multiple shift entrances, break areas, and loading docks needs device placement mapped against where people actually move through the building — not against where a unit is most convenient to mount or most visible to a visitor walking through the front lobby. The right number of units for a facility the size of a manufacturing plant is rarely one; it's however many it takes to keep every regularly occupied area within a short, practiced walk of a device.
Condition Two: People Who Know Where It Is
A device that exists somewhere in the building is only useful if the people near an emergency know where to find it, fast, without searching. That knowledge doesn't happen from a single new-hire orientation slide shown once during onboarding. Signage at eye level, near the device and along the paths leading to it, does more sustained work than any onboarding packet.
Shift-level awareness is the detail most programs miss. An annual training roster tells you who sat through a session at some point in the past year — it does not tell you whether the specific people working the floor on a Tuesday night shift know where the AED is right now. Turnover, shift transfers, and simple forgetting all erode that knowledge steadily between training sessions. A floor walk, where someone actually asks workers on each shift "where's the nearest AED from here," will find gaps that a training completion spreadsheet never will.
Condition Three: People Who Are Willing and Ready to Act
Knowing where a device is and being ready to use it under real pressure are different skills. This is where drills and designated responders make the difference between a plan on paper and a plan that works. A facility that has run through the response sequence — recognize, call for help, start CPR, retrieve the AED, apply it — at least once with its actual staff has a meaningfully different level of readiness than one that's only reviewed the steps in a handout.
Hesitation to act is often less about willingness than about uncertainty, and Good Samaritan protections exist specifically to remove that hesitation. In plain terms: nearly every state, including Indiana, provides legal protection for someone who acts in good faith to help a person in a medical emergency, including using an AED, as long as they're not reckless. Coworkers are not expected to be medical professionals to help save a life, and they are not exposing themselves to liability by trying. Making sure staff actually know this — not just that the equipment exists, but that they're protected for using it — is part of building the willingness that Goshen's coworkers clearly had.
Designated Responders Change the Odds
Some facilities go a step further than general staff awareness and name specific designated responders per shift — individuals who carry explicit responsibility for responding to a medical emergency, who receive more thorough hands-on training than a general staff briefing provides, and whose names are posted alongside the AED signage itself. This isn't a requirement everywhere, and it isn't the only way to build readiness, but it solves a real problem: in a facility of any size, a true emergency creates a moment of diffusion of responsibility, where everyone assumes someone else is already handling it. A named responder on shift removes that ambiguity before it costs time.
This doesn't need to be a large program to be effective. A handful of volunteers per shift, given a few hours of hands-on CPR and AED training beyond what the rest of the staff receives, is enough to change what happens in the first minute of an emergency — which, as the data on cardiac arrest survival consistently shows, is the minute that matters most.
The Maintenance Layer Nobody Sees Until It Matters
All three conditions above assume the device works when someone reaches for it, and that assumption depends entirely on a maintenance layer that's invisible until the moment it isn't. Pads and batteries have expiration dates, and an AED with expired pads is a box that looks ready and isn't. Most programs need a monthly visual check — confirming the device's status indicator, checking that pads and battery are within date, verifying the unit hasn't been moved or damaged — and a documented record of that check.
Documentation matters for two separate reasons. It's what lets a facility prove, after the fact, that its program was actually maintained rather than just installed once and forgotten. And it's what surfaces a lapse before an emergency does — a monthly check that's been skipped for three months is a warning sign a program can catch on paper, long before it becomes a device that fails in the moment it's needed.
A One-Page Floor Walk You Can Run This Week
None of the above requires new equipment to start assessing. It requires walking the floor and asking direct questions, department by department and shift by shift:
How many AEDs does this facility have, and can you point to each one on a floor plan without checking a document? Standing in the furthest work area from the nearest device, how long would it actually take someone to retrieve it and bring it back? Ask three workers on a shift other than the day shift where the nearest AED is — do they know, without hesitation? When was the pad and battery expiration on each unit last checked, and is there a record of it? Has this facility run an actual practice scenario in the last year, with real staff walking through the response, rather than reviewing the steps in a training document?
If any of those questions come back thin — a location nobody can confirm, an expiration date nobody's checked, a shift that's never been asked — that's the actual gap to close, and it's worth a call rather than a note to revisit later. AED Professionals works with manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution facilities on exactly this kind of program review: right-sizing device placement for a real floor plan, building the maintenance schedule that keeps units actually ready, and helping put a practiced response plan in place rather than a filed one. Pat Moran's coworkers had all three conditions in place when it mattered. The question worth answering this week is whether yours do too.
