Each year, almost 300,000 people suffer out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in the United States. Survival rates from these events tend to be extremely low. However, research has shown that hands-only bystander CPR can triple survival from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. The problem is that bystanders that witness a cardiac arrest only attempt CPR about 26% of the time- and getting more people trained and comfortable is the key to saving lives. Ben Bobrow, M.D. (our EMS Medical Director) was the lead author and Vatsal Chikani and Paula R. Brazil co-wrote a new study published this week in Circulation found that even an ultra-brief (60 second) training video people did much better. This finding has enormous public health implications because now we know that even brief interventions like viewing a training video can be effective training tools for bystanders.
Ultra Brief CPR Videos Work
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I think it’s important to emphasize that hands-only CPR is for a very specific situation: sudden cardiac arrest. When infants and children need CPR it is frequently because of an airway emergency such as a severe allergic reaction, drowning, choking or suffocation. These victims are lacking oxygen and need rescue breaths. If you are a parent taking a CPR class, you need learn how to give rescue breaths along with compressions.
Good point Chris, it is important that the general public understands that hands only CPR is only an option for adults. This is an interesting article, there is something to be said for simplification. Minimizing the general fears that people associate with CPR, for example mouth-to-mouth, encourages people to try.
In cities like Seattle, their aggressive community CPR training and placement of public access defibrillators has increased local survival rates for SCA to near 50% while the rest of the US has averaged only 6% survival rates for SCA. Hands only CPR is a great way for communities to engage their citizens in the fight to push up survival rates! Let’s hope we see more.
Thank you for your work. Post assisted me quite a bit