Gwinnett County's most urgent cardiac arrest problem is not what many would expect from a community outperforming the national average. Despite a bystander CPR rate of 48.4%, nearly 6 percentage points above the national benchmark of 42.5%, an estimated 210 cardiac arrest victims in Gwinnett County received no CPR before EMS arrived in 2025.
The survival gap is more striking in Utstein cases, the gold-standard measure for the most survivable cardiac arrests. Gwinnett's Utstein survival rate is 22.7%, which is 10.5 percentage points below the national benchmark of 33.2%. The report frames this as a community showing strong participation metrics while still leaving a measurable opportunity to improve outcomes.
The data comes from 407 non-traumatic cardiac arrest events documented by Gwinnett Fire & EMS in 2025. Gwinnett exceeds national benchmarks across three of four key metrics: bystander CPR rate, public AED use at 17.2% compared with the national 13.9%, and overall survival to hospital discharge at 12.8% compared with 10.5% nationally.
That progress is real, and the report links it to the practical value of community CPR training programs. But the ceiling is measurably higher. Alaska achieved a 77.0% bystander CPR rate in 2025, the highest rate in the national CARES dataset. Applied to the combined Gwinnett and Forsyth County cardiac arrest volume of approximately 520 events per year, matching Alaska's rate would produce an estimated 12 additional survivors annually. Matching the top-performing U.S. EMS agency benchmark of 81.5% would yield an estimated 14.
The barriers keeping that gap open are largely behavioral and institutional, not medical. Antoinette Lewis of the Work Readiness Center identifies lack of employer requirements and fear of being sued as common reasons people have never taken CPR. Georgia Code Section 51-1-29 protects good-faith lay rescuers from legal liability, yet fear of litigation remains a reason some bystanders fail to act.
The survival difference is clear in the report's source data: 14.5% survival with bystander CPR versus 6.5% without bystander CPR. The report's central argument is that Gwinnett County is not failing on cardiac arrest response; it has demonstrated capacity to save more lives and a specific, quantifiable gap between current performance and achievable performance.
Twelve additional survivors per year is not presented as an aspirational claim. It is a projection built from Gwinnett's documented survival differentials and a benchmark comparison. The Work Readiness Center's role in the report is to help close that gap through AHA-certified CPR training for North Atlanta residents, employers, and community organizations.