Four hundred and fifty-eight people in New South Wales walked out of a hospital in 2024 after their heart stopped in a driveway, a shopping centre, a train station or a lounge room floor. A year earlier, a good number of them wouldn’t have. That is the quiet headline buried in the NSW Ambulance Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Registry 2024 Report: the highest survival rate the state has recorded since the registry began tracking these events in 2017.
It’s a genuinely good news story, and those are rare enough in first aid that we’re going to enjoy it. But the same report also spells out, in plain numbers, exactly who did the life-saving — and it wasn’t only paramedics. If you’ve ever wondered whether the CPR you’d do on a stranger actually changes anything, this year’s data answers the question about as bluntly as data can. It’s the same reason we bang on about learning the SAMPLE acronym and knowing what belongs in a proper first aid kit: the person standing next to the emergency is the one who decides how it ends.
One thing worth clearing up before we dig in: yes, it’s 2026, and yes, this report covers the 2024 calendar year. That gap is completely normal. An out-of-hospital cardiac arrest registry has to capture every case across the state, link each patient to their hospital and 30-day survival records, quality-check the coding and then compile and publish it — a process that runs well over a year. So the 2024 report, released in 2026, is the most recent and most complete picture available. These are the latest figures, not old news — and they are the numbers the whole sector is working from right now.
The headline: 458 people who went home
NSW Ambulance attended 10,625 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) in 2024 — the most of any state or territory in Australia. Paramedics attempted resuscitation, or the patient had already been brought back by bystanders before crews arrived, in 3,587 of those cases. Of that group, 13.1% were still alive 30 days later. That’s the 458 people.
Thirteen per cent might not sound like a triumph until you sit with what a cardiac arrest actually is. This isn’t a heart attack, where the plumbing is blocked but the person is usually awake and talking. A cardiac arrest is the electrics failing: the heart stops pumping, the person drops, stops breathing normally, and is clinically dead within seconds. Left alone, survival is close to zero. So moving the whole-state number to 13.1% — the best figure in the registry’s history — represents hundreds of families who got a different phone call than the one they were dreading.
Among the group clinicians consider most survivable — the “Utstein” subgroup of witnessed arrests with a shockable heart rhythm — 31.2% survived to 30 days. Roughly one in three. When the conditions line up and people act fast, this is a survivable event, not a foregone conclusion.
What “highest ever” actually means
A quick word on the numbers, because cardiac arrest statistics are easy to mangle and we’d rather you trust ours.
The 13.1% figure is survival to 30 days, not merely survival to hospital. NSW Ambulance measures 30-day survival deliberately: it captures whether someone actually pulled through, rather than whether they had a pulse when they were wheeled through the emergency doors and then deteriorated. It’s a harder, more honest bar to clear, which makes a record year against that bar more meaningful, not less.
It’s also drawn from the cohort where resuscitation was attempted or the patient regained circulation before the ambulance arrived — the people who genuinely had a fighting chance. That’s the right group to judge the system on. And across a full eight years of data, 2024 sits at the top.
Why survival went up: four things that changed
Records don’t happen by accident, and the report is refreshingly specific about what moved the needle. Four shifts stand out, and three of them are things ordinary people did.
More bystanders started CPR
In bystander-witnessed arrests, 57.7% of patients got CPR from someone nearby before paramedics arrived. That matters enormously, and the report quantifies why: when a bystander did CPR, 30-day survival was 8.3%, compared with 0.5% when nobody did. Event survival — getting a pulse back at the scene — jumped from 1.9% to 17.9%.
Read those numbers again. Bystander CPR was associated with more than a sixteen-fold difference in 30-day survival. Not a tweak. A different outcome entirely. The Australian Resuscitation Council is unambiguous that early, continuous chest compressions are the single most valuable thing a bystander can provide, and the NSW data is a real-world demonstration of it. For every minute a person in cardiac arrest goes without CPR, their chance of survival falls by roughly 7–10%. The compressions you’d do — even imperfect ones — buy the time paramedics need to arrive.
Public AEDs did the heavy lifting
Here’s the statistic that should be on a billboard. When a bystander used an automated external defibrillator (AED) to deliver a shock before paramedics arrived, 30-day survival was 45.0%. When no bystander shock was delivered, it was 2.6%.
Forty-five per cent. From a device designed so that a person with zero training can use it, because it talks you through every step and won’t shock anyone who doesn’t need it. In 2024, bystanders defibrillated 180 patients with a public AED, and 73 people were successfully resuscitated by bystanders before an ambulance even turned up. An AED on a wall is not decoration — in the right two minutes it’s the most powerful medical tool in the building.
GoodSAM put a trained responder around the corner
2024 was the first full year of GoodSAM integrated with the NSW triple-zero system — an app that alerts registered volunteers when someone nearby is in cardiac arrest, so a trained pair of hands can start CPR in the minutes before paramedics arrive. Over the year, 5,027 new volunteers signed up, bringing the total to 9,145 responders across the state.
The impact is tangible: on average a GoodSAM responder was just 707 metres from the arrest and reached the patient in about four minutes. Those responders provided CPR or applied an AED to 222 people in 2024, and 40 of them survived to 30 days. Forty people alive because a stranger’s phone buzzed and they ran.
Paramedics upgraded their skills and kit
The professional end of the chain got stronger too. Through 2024 NSW Ambulance focused on High Performance CPR in training, added more Intensive Care Paramedics with advanced skills to the workforce, and completed the rollout of new enhanced monitor-defibrillators to every ambulance in the state. Better tools, sharper technique, and a clinician workforce built around the actions that are known to save lives.
The number that matters most on the Mid North Coast
Now the part that hits closer to home. The statewide average hides a stubborn geographic gap, and if you live around Port Macquarie, Taree or Forster/Tuncurry, you’re on the wrong side of it.
Cardiac arrest is more common outside the cities. The report puts crude incidence at 158 per 100,000 people in non-metropolitan NSW against 102 in metropolitan NSW. And when someone collapses out here, help is further away: the median ambulance response time to a bystander-witnessed arrest was 9 minutes in Greater Sydney and the Central Coast, but 12 minutes across the rest of NSW. The Mid North Coast is squarely in that “rest of NSW” figure.
Three minutes doesn’t sound like much until you remember the 7–10%-per-minute rule. Over that extra window, an untreated cardiac arrest patient’s odds can quietly evaporate before the ambulance has cleared the highway. Which flips the usual thinking on its head: the further you are from a hospital, the more the outcome depends on the people already in the room. Rural and regional survival isn’t decided in the emergency department. It’s decided in the first ten minutes, on the floor, by whoever is standing there.
That’s not a reason to feel exposed. It’s the single best reason to be the person who knows what to do. A short, practical CPR course in Port Macquarie or a nationally recognised first aid course in Taree is the difference between freezing and moving in the exact minutes the data says matter most.
The gaps the record is hiding
A record year is worth celebrating, but the report is honest about where the system still falls short — and these are the parts a headline tends to skip.
Women get less bystander CPR, and survive less often. Among bystander-witnessed arrests assigned an emergency response, the bystander CPR rate was 86.5% for men and 80.2% for women. The survival gap is starker still: males in the treated cohort had a 30-day survival rate of 14.8%, compared with 9.5% for females. Some of that is physiology, but hesitation to start CPR on a woman is a known and documented problem, and it costs lives. The reassurance is simple: you push on the centre of the chest, hard and fast. The technique doesn’t change, and no one has ever regretted starting compressions on someone whose heart had stopped.
Then there’s the rhythm the heart is in when help arrives. Patients found in a shockable rhythm survived at 37.1%; those in a non-shockable rhythm survived at just 4.8% (pulseless electrical activity 7.6%, asystole 1.4%). Here’s the catch — shockable rhythms decay into non-shockable ones with every passing minute. Early CPR and early defibrillation are, in large part, a race to reach the person while their heart is still in a rhythm a shock can fix. Speed is the whole game.
And location matters more than most people expect. Arrests in a public place survived at 23.4% to 30 days, versus 10.1% in a private home — largely because public collapses are more likely to be witnessed, to attract a bystander, and to be near an AED. Since 77.9% of all arrests happen in private residences, the person most likely to save a life in your home is, statistically, you.
What this all means for you
Strip the report back and the message is almost embarrassingly consistent with what we teach every week. Survival from cardiac arrest is a chain, and the first three links belong to the public: recognise it and call triple zero, start CPR immediately, and get a defibrillator on as fast as possible. Paramedics and hospitals are links four and five — decisive, but only if the first three have bought enough time to hand a living patient over.
Recognising an arrest is simpler than people fear: the person is unresponsive and not breathing normally (gasping doesn’t count as breathing). Call 000, put it on speaker, and the call-taker will coach you. Push hard and fast in the centre of the chest — about two per second — and don’t stop for more than a moment until an AED or paramedics take over. Send someone to find the nearest defib, or let the AED and the 000 operator guide you through it. That’s the entire life-saving sequence, and it fits on a coaster.
The only variable the report can’t measure is whether you’ve ever practised it. Reading about compressions and doing them on a manikin until the rhythm is in your hands are two very different things — and in a real event, muscle memory is what shows up when the adrenaline hits.
Learn the skills the data keeps pointing to
If this year’s numbers make one argument, it’s that trained bystanders change outcomes — and training is the part you control. At Coastal First Aid we run nationally recognised courses across the Mid North Coast built around exactly the actions the registry credits: high-quality CPR, confident AED use, and the calm decision-making that turns a panicked minute into a survivable one.
For most people the quickest step is our Provide CPR course, a short session that covers compressions and defibrillation to the current ANZCOR guidelines. If you want the fuller skill set — bleeding, choking, anaphylaxis and more alongside CPR — the nationally recognised Provide First Aid course is the one to book. You can enrol in a course in a couple of minutes, or check upcoming course dates in Port Macquarie, Taree and Forster/Tuncurry to find one that suits.
Running a workplace, a childcare centre or a community group? Getting a whole team trained at once is the highest-leverage version of everything above — it puts a capable responder in the room before an emergency ever happens. We come to you: request workplace or group training or get in touch and we’ll sort the details. The 2024 record was built by people who’d decided, in advance, to be useful. That decision is available to you today.
Frequently asked questions
Why is a 2024 cardiac arrest report only out in 2026?
Because the data takes time to assemble. Every out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in NSW has to be captured, then each patient linked to hospital and 30-day survival records, quality-checked and compiled before the annual report is published — a process that runs well over a year. The 2024 report released in 2026 is the most recent and complete data available, so these are the latest figures, not outdated ones.
What was the cardiac arrest survival rate in NSW in 2024?
For the cohort where NSW Ambulance attempted resuscitation or the patient regained circulation before crews arrived, the 30-day survival rate was 13.1% in 2024 — 458 people, and the highest rate recorded since the registry began in 2017. Among the most survivable “Utstein” group (witnessed arrests with a shockable rhythm), survival was 31.2%.
How much does bystander CPR improve the chance of survival?
Dramatically. The NSW report found 30-day survival was 8.3% when a bystander performed CPR before paramedics arrived, versus 0.5% when no one did. When a bystander also delivered a shock with an AED, 30-day survival rose to 45.0%. Every minute without CPR reduces survival by roughly 7–10%, so acting immediately is what counts.
Do I need training to use a public defibrillator (AED)?
No. An AED is designed for untrained bystanders — it gives spoken instructions, analyses the heart rhythm itself, and will only deliver a shock if one is needed, so you can’t accidentally shock someone who doesn’t require it. That said, having used one in a course removes the hesitation in a real emergency, which is precisely when seconds matter.
Where can I learn CPR and first aid on the Mid North Coast?
Coastal First Aid runs nationally recognised CPR and first aid courses in Port Macquarie, Taree and Forster/Tuncurry. You can enrol online, view upcoming course dates, or arrange onsite training for your workplace or group. Both the short Provide CPR course and the fuller Provide First Aid course cover the compressions-and-defibrillation skills the 2024 registry credits with saving lives.
