Sudden Cardiac Arrest Awareness Month: A Four-Week AED Readiness Plan for Any Facility

Awareness months fail when they ask people to feel something instead of do something.

September is Sudden Cardiac Arrest Awareness Month. It is also National Preparedness Month, which means safety managers, HR teams and school administrators already have preparedness on their internal calendar and are actively looking for something worth circulating. What most of them will receive is a statistic they already agreed with in January.

Nobody who manages a building needs convincing that sudden cardiac arrest is serious. What they need is a short list of things they can finish. So here is September structured as four small assignments, one per week, each completable in an afternoon by one person with a clipboard.

By October you will have an accurate device inventory, a maintenance list, a training gap list, and a real measured response time. That is a preparedness program, and it is more than most organizations can produce today.

Week one: find them

Walk the building. Not the spreadsheet, the building.

Write down every AED you find, its exact location, its manufacturer and model, and its serial number. Include the places that get skipped: the auxiliary gym, the loading dock, the annex nobody visits, the concession stand, the vehicle assigned to the safety coordinator.

Two discrepancies are extremely common on a first walk. The first is a device that exists but appears in no record. The second is a record for a device that no longer exists, usually because it was moved during a renovation and never logged. Either one means your written plan currently describes a building you do not have.

Deliverable: a single list with one row per device.

Week two: check them

Open every cabinet. This is the week that finds real problems.

For each device, record the electrode pad expiration date, the battery expiration date, and the state of the status indicator. Confirm the rescue kit is present and intact, that a spare set of pads is available if your program stocks them, and that pediatric pads or a pediatric key are on hand wherever children are present.

Pads and batteries are consumables with hard expiration dates, typically two to five years depending on model. An expired set is the single most common defect in an otherwise well-intentioned AED program, and it is invisible unless someone opens the cabinet. A unit can report itself ready and still be unable to deliver effective therapy through pads whose gel has dried out — our note on what actually happens with expired pads covers why. If a device is chirping at you, the chirp codes by brand will tell you which consumable it wants.

Flag anything expiring before next September, not just anything already expired. Ordering on a known schedule costs the same as ordering in a panic and takes less of your week. Our pads and batteries by model guide lists the exact part number for every AED we carry.

Deliverable: expiration dates on every row of the week-one list, plus a replacement order.

Week three: name them

Write down who is trained and currently certified, by shift and by floor or area.

The word "currently" is doing the work in that sentence. A certification that lapsed in March is not coverage, and a roster that lists a person who left the organization in June is worse than no roster because it creates false confidence.

Structure the list the way an emergency actually unfolds. If someone collapses on the third floor at 7 p.m., who is in the building, and are they certified? Most organizations discover their coverage is concentrated in daytime administrative staff and thins out badly during evenings, weekends and events.

Wherever a shift or area has no name beside it, you have not found a paperwork gap. You have found a training request, and it now has a specific justification attached to it, which makes it considerably easier to fund.

Deliverable: a responder roster with certification expiration dates, and a training request for the gaps.

Week four: run it

One drill. Ten minutes. No advance notice beyond telling people a drill will happen sometime this week.

A workable script: someone calls out a simulated collapse at a specific location. Someone else calls 911, or states aloud that they are doing so. A third person goes for the nearest AED and brings it back. Someone times the whole sequence from the call to the AED arriving at the scene.

Then write the number down. That number is the most useful single fact your organization will produce all month, and it is the one thing no policy document can tell you. Anything over about three minutes round trip is a placement problem rather than a procedure problem — our piece on time to first shock works through how to measure it properly, and the one-per-floor rule covers multistory buildings specifically.

Debrief for five minutes afterward. The questions worth asking are simple. Did the responder know where the device was? Was the route clear? Was any door locked? Did anyone hesitate about who was supposed to do what?

Deliverable: one recorded response time and a short list of fixes.

Why this beats an awareness campaign

Because at the end of it you own four artifacts that persist: a device inventory, a maintenance schedule, a responder roster and a measured response time. Each of those feeds directly into whatever compliance obligation applies to you, whether that is a school cardiac emergency response plan, a state AED registration requirement, an OSHA emergency action plan, or an insurer's questionnaire.

It also builds something reusable. The four-week structure runs again next September with the same four deliverables and a year of comparison data. The second year takes half as long as the first.

Start now

Print the four tasks. Assign each one to a person and a date. If you only get through week one and week two, you will still have caught the expired pads, which is the failure most likely to matter.

Frequently asked questions

When is Sudden Cardiac Arrest Awareness Month?

September. It runs alongside National Preparedness Month, which is why September is the month most safety managers and school administrators are already thinking about emergency readiness.

How often should AEDs be inspected?

A visual check monthly — status indicator showing ready, cabinet intact and unobstructed, rescue kit present — plus a quarterly review of upcoming pad and battery expirations and an annual review of the written plan, the responder roster and at least one drill.

What is the most common problem found in an AED program?

Expired electrode pads. They are consumables with hard expiration dates, typically two to five years depending on model, and the defect is invisible unless someone opens the cabinet. A unit can report itself ready while being unable to deliver effective therapy through dried-out pads.

How do you run an AED drill?

Ten minutes is enough. Someone calls out a simulated collapse at a specific location, someone calls 911 or states aloud that they are doing so, a third person retrieves the nearest AED and brings it back, and someone times the sequence from call to device arriving on scene. Debrief for five minutes afterward and record the time.

Sources

• American Red Cross, Sudden Cardiac Arrest Awareness Month resources — redcross.org
• Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation — sca-aware.org

Related

• Can you use expired AED pads?
• Why is my AED beeping? Chirp codes by brand
• Seven states, one school year: the 2026-27 cardiac emergency plan checklist
• How many AEDs does a building need: the one-per-floor rule
• How to set up an AED program

Last reviewed: September 1, 2026. For general education only, not medical or legal advice. Confirm your own compliance obligations with your state regulator or counsel.