Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) today is the news that Denmark has achieved an excellent increase in survival rates from patients suffering sudden cardiac arrest. Since 2005 Denmark have initiated simple programmes to improve public awareness and knowledge of how & when to perform Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR). These programmes have included;
- Teaching children CPR skills from elementary school stage.
- Teens required to learn CPR to gain driving licence.
- Community based training courses – open for all to attend.
These programmes have resulted in an increase from 8% to 22% of patients arriving at hospital alive after suffering a sudden cardiac arrest. Furthermore those patients who survived to at least one year after discharge from hospital has changed from 3% to 10%. The full story from USA today can be viewed here;
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/01/cpr-saves-lives/2903045/
RAMC Ltd Director Steve Furnell, who established and ran the community resuscitation element of the capital heartbeat programme for London, commented;
“This is a great statistical increase in such a short space of time. It is simple programmes such as this that will have a long term affect on survival rates. By learning from cities such as Seattle that established their similar ‘Medic One’ programme in the 1970’s has allowed them to increase their survival rates to in excess of 45%. London has increased its survival rates from 1.9% to in excess of 35% since 1999 due to establishing a number of different initiatives using the Chain of Survival as it’s base template for change.
However, we are still struggling in the UK to get simple life saving skills onto the national curriculum for children. Until we start teaching our young we will not significantly change the long term survival rates.”
If you would like to look at what you can do in your community, be it at home, work or your social life, to help work towards improving survival rates from Sudden Cardiac Arrests then give us a call. We can help you from talking through different ideas to helping you implement and manage a programme.
