As Spekkio has mentioned, there's lots of important info not addressed in the news report. The hospital where I practice is on a university campus with lots of buildings, we don't send our hospital code blue (medical emergency response) team to buildings that aren't physically attached to the hospital. We depend on the medical people on duty in the building and our local EMS service. There's valid reasons for that I won't get into here, but one point mentioned above is true - if the guy was in cardiac arrest and receiving CPR, then a stretcher and likely an ALS ambulance would be necessary to transport him with CPR in progress. in looking at the times, we also don't know if some of that time represents resuscitation tasks (intubation, defibrillation) done at the scene before moving him, which is likely - and the right thing to do - if paramedics & physicians are on the scene.
I do hope an AED was nearby and used. Although medical literature has always supported AED's, I used to think that AED's were expensive technology with little benefit until I saved a man's life with one about a year ago at a gate in O'Hare airport (for medical people on the board: sudden cardiac arrest, v-fib - AED had an LCD monitor on it so I could see the whole thing - converted to sinus rhythm with one shock & has ROSC before CFD paramedics arrived). So I am now a major advocate for AED's.
The VA will do a full - and very thorough - root cause analysis (RCA) of this event and if there are things to be corrected, they will do it. The RCA won't be released but given the public and media interest I'm guessing there will be some followup information reported to the public.
