SOMEONE near you is suffering a cardiac arrest - and then help comes from above in the form of a defibrillator-carrying drone!
It might sound far-fetched, but a study has found that drones carrying a heart-starting defibrillator, which could be used by a member of the public, reached patients four times faster than an ambulance.
In the trial, conducted by the Karolinka Institute in Sweden, drones responded to 18 simulated cardiac arrests within a six-mile radius of their base, beating the ambulance every time.
The study found the 5.7kg drones, which were equipped with a global positioning system, high definition camera and communicated via the 3G global network, arrived 16 minutes faster than the emergency services on average, saving precious time.
The results, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found the fully-automated machines took an average of five minutes and 21 seconds to reach their destination, compared with 22 minutes for the ambulance.
The median time from call to dispatch of the ambulance was three minutes, compared with three seconds for the drone.
"Saving 16 minutes is likely to be clinically important," the researchers wrote, adding that "further test flights, technological developments, and evaluation of integration with dispatch centres and aviation administrators are needed".
In Australia, recent ambulance response figures show from 2015-2016 the Northern Territory had the longest ambulance response time at 27.3 minutes with the ACT fairing best with 13.7 minutes.
The 90th percentile data from the Report on Government Services looks at the time within which 90 per cent of first responding ambulances arrived at the scene of a code one emergency.