ATTN: a "new" CPR....not that new, but often unknown

[Dr Mordrid]

Steady chest compression only, no mouth to mouth, for the early stages of intervention.

Video (ad precedes it)....

Link....

For young mom, new CPR beat back death

Story Highlights

• Woman, 33, suffered sudden cardiac arrest; was without heartbeat 18 minutes
• Husband, a trained first responder, did new-style CPR, with compressions only
• Their state, Arizona, has seen cardiac arrest survival triple since adopting procedure

FLAGSTAFF, Arizona (CNN) -- The Hardens were losing track of each other's conversations. It had been a long, exhausting day for both Scott, a sheriff's deputy, and Kathie, an elementary school teacher. The couple put their two young children to bed, turned on the Food Network for a few minutes, then called it a night.
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Scott got out of bed and turned on the light. His wife's face was pale. Kathie wasn't snoring. She was gasping for breath.

"I got her to the floor because I knew I'd have to do CPR pretty soon," Scott said. "She took one big breath and I thought that's enough time to get me to my house phone for the 911 reversal. In case I couldn't talk, at least I could dial and throw the phone to the floor, and they could track it."
>
Working to calm himself, Scott performed a new type of CPR on his wife. No pausing for mouth-to-mouth. Compressions only. Since 2004, the technique has been utilized throughout Arizona to minimize interruptions in blood flow to a cardiac arrest victim's heart and brain. In the last five years, statewide survival has more than tripled.

"We said it's hard to do a lot worse than 97 percent of the people dying, and so we revamped everything from how we track cardiac arrest, to how we train the public to do CPR and how we train dispatchers to give CPR instruction," said Dr. Ben Bobrow, who oversees emergency services for the Arizona Department of Health. "What we think right now is at the very early stages of cardiac arrest, when someone initially collapses, the really important thing is to just get blood moving though the body, and that's by doing rapid, forceful, uninterrupted compressions."
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[Marshmallowman]

I heard about this "new" method at least a year ago, but last year when i did a first aid course they were still teaching the old system.

[Brian Ellis]

The video has a grave error. CPR will somewhat deflate/inflate the lungs as well as compress the right ventricle to help blood to circulate. It is important to make sure the airways are clear before starting the CPR, so as to make sure that blood is also partially oxygenated. If the airways are blocked the patient is a-goner much faster and the chances of a recovery are reduced. Worse, if the patient's heart recovers after a few minutes CPR and a reflex action coughs the airways clear, (s)he may be permanently brain-impaired. Probably better if (s)he had not had CPR and had simply died.

[VJ]

I remember the first time I had cpr courses (some 20-odd years ago) , the mouth to mouth was just slightly less than the compressions (1-2 to 5). When I followed a course just a few years ago, this ratio had been changed dramatically to 1 to 20. The compressions also needed to be much faster than before.

[DukeP]

I had to do compression for 24 minutes. Longest timeperiod I ever experienced.

We where two, but the other person did not know how to do cpr, so I set her to do mouth to mouth.

The person I tried to help was running a local 12 kilometer run. I would guess him to have been 50 or so. He just keeled over, 50 meters from where I was standing.

Unfortunately he did not make it - he was declared dead the next day.

~~DukeP~~

[Dr Mordrid]

My longest was about 20 minutes; a 50-something woman arrested in a supermarket and I happened to be 15 feet away. Squad was held up by an accident and I had to wing it with just the store manager, who thankfully had some cool & could follow directions. She made it, with a lot of help from The Man upstairs.

I really prefer having a crash cart handy

[VJ]

Here they are putting an electronic defibrilator in most public buildings (city halls, university buildings, post offices, ...). Usually, it is indicated with a particular sign (green plaque with a heart and the letter AED).

Jörg

[Dr Mordrid]

Same here, but those defibs aren't always equivalent to the ones in squads and ER's.

[Wulfman]

the ones in the ER don´t have voice commands to walk people like me through applying them?

mfg
wulfman

[Dr Mordrid]

The people using them in ER's and squads hopefully don't need the prompts, plus they have enough power to do more than just a few hits as they're usually plugged in.

[cjolley]

In fact, I believe they put them in in our building and then took them out later.
I'll try to find out the story tomorrow.

PS Talk about lucky. We hired a dba several years ago who had a heart condition. She went in to cardiac arrest while she was at the required new-hire safety training class.
She was not at her scheduled training session because she missed hers due to a database emergency.
Her class consisted of the instructor and 16 newly hired firefighters, fresh out of school.
Talk about the best place in the world to go into cardiac arrest.
She came out fine.