TempoLife › Features › Defibrillators and cardiac arrest response › registers
National registers, and getting your device into one
A defibrillator the dispatcher cannot see barely exists. What a national register is, which one is the real one in each country, why registration is free, and the paid look-alikes to avoid.
CPR in sixty seconds
- Unresponsive and not breathing normally? Gasping is not breathing. Treat it as a cardiac arrest.
- Call 112 (113 in Norway). Speaker on, phone on the floor. Stay on the line — the dispatcher will coach you.
- Push hard and fast in the centre of the chest: 5–6 cm in an adult, 100–120 per minute, letting the chest come all the way back up.
- Send somebody else for a defibrillator. Do not go yourself unless it is seconds away. Keep compressing.
- Turn the device on and do what it says. It decides whether to shock. After a shock, go straight back to compressions.
This is a reference written for bystanders, not a diagnosis, a training course or medical advice. It cannot tell you what is wrong with a particular person, and it does not replace the dispatcher on the other end of an emergency call — they can see what is near you and they will talk you through it. If you are worried about your own heart, or about a symptom, that is a conversation with a clinician rather than a page on a website.
What a register is for
When a call comes in, the dispatcher's screen shows the caller's position and, in a system with a register, the defibrillators near it — with the address, the floor, the access arrangement and whether the device is available at that hour. That is the whole point. A device nobody has registered cannot be sent for, cannot be given to a volunteer responder, and in practice is only useful to people who already knew it was there. Registration is the step that turns a purchase into part of the emergency system.
What the register wants to know
Precise location in words a stranger can act on — not just a street address but "main entrance lobby, on the right of the reception desk, in a green cabinet". Availability: round the clock, or only during opening hours, which is the single most common cause of a wasted run. Access: is the door locked, is there a code, is the cabinet alarmed. A contact who is responsible for the device. Make, model, and the expiry dates of the pads and battery. Coordinates, if the device is somewhere an address does not describe well.
Availability is the field that gets lied about
A device inside a shop that closes at 18:00 is not a 24-hour device, and registering it as one sends a runner to a locked door in the middle of the night. Be honest in the availability field, and if you can, change the fact rather than the record: an outdoor heated cabinet on the wall of the building makes a device genuinely available at three in the morning, which is when a large share of arrests happen.
The paid look-alike problem
In more than one country in this region, commercial services have set up "registers" with official-sounding names that charge an annual fee and are not the database any dispatcher reads. Norwegian first-aid organisations have publicly warned owners about exactly this. The test is simple: the national register is run by the emergency medical service, the resuscitation council, the health directorate or a foundation working with them, and registering is free. If somebody sends you an invoice for keeping your defibrillator on a map, you are almost certainly not on the map that matters.
Registering it twice is fine
Putting the device in the national register is the step that reaches the dispatcher. Adding it to OpenStreetMap as an emergency=defibrillator node additionally makes it visible to anyone using an open map or an app built on one, under an open licence, worldwide and permanently. The two are complementary and neither replaces the other; the OSM entry has the advantage that anyone can correct it when the cabinet moves.
| Country | Register | Run by | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Estonia | No single national public register | Devices are reported to the emergency system; Häirekeskus takes 112 | n/a |
| Finland | defi.fi | Sydänliitto with the Resuscitation Council and Red Cross | Free |
| Latvia | No single national public register | NMPD publishes AED guidance for owners | n/a |
| Lithuania | AED database held by the emergency medical service | Greitosios medicinos pagalbos tarnyba with the health ministry | Free |
| Sweden | Hjärtstartarregistret | Svenska HLR-rådet | Free |
| Norway | Hjertestarterregisteret | NAKOS for the Directorate of Health | Free |
| Denmark | Hjertestarter-Netværket | TrygFonden with the regions | Free |
Sources: defi.fi — the Finnish defibrillator register · Sydänliitto on the defi.fi service · Hjärtstartarregistret (Sweden) · Helsenorge — register your defibrillator (Norway) · Røde Kors Førstehjelp on registering in the right register · hjertestarter.dk (Denmark) · OpenStreetMap tag emergency=defibrillator · checked 2026-09-08
Frequently asked questions
Does it cost anything to register a defibrillator?
No. The national registers in this region are free. A service that invoices you annually to appear on a defibrillator map is not the database emergency dispatchers use.
What happens if I do not register it?
The dispatcher cannot send anyone for it and volunteer responders will not be routed to it. It remains useful to people who already know it is there, which in an emergency is usually nobody.
How often should the entry be updated?
At least annually, and immediately whenever the cabinet moves, the opening hours change, the pads or battery are replaced, or the responsible contact leaves.
How the system around it works
The chain of survival, link by link
Recognition and a call, early CPR, early defibrillation, advanced care and recovery. What each link is actually worth, which one the public owns, and where the chain breaks in practice.
What the survival numbers actually say
Roughly one in ten survives an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, and the spread between towns is wider than the spread between treatments. How to read the statistics without being misled by them.
Volunteer responder systems
Denmark, Sweden and Norway alert trained volunteers by phone to arrests near them — one to fetch the defibrillator, one to start compressions. How the systems work, who can join, and what happens when your phone goes off.
Where public defibrillators actually are
The green sign with the heart and the lightning bolt, the places that reliably have one, the cabinets that are locked and the ones that are not, and what to do when you have thirty seconds to decide whether to go looking.
What a defibrillator costs to buy and to keep
The purchase is the small part. Pads and batteries expire on a schedule, cabinets and signage cost real money in a cold climate, and the recurring line is what an organisation forgets to budget for.
Everything on this subject
Before the emergency, there is a long quiet stretch
Blood pressure, resting heart rate, movement and sleep are the part of this you can act on for years beforehand. TempoLife keeps them in one place, free to start.