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Summary of Changes to Resuscitation Guidelines

By Bill, posted

Each year UK ambulance services respond to 60,000 cases of suspected cardiac arrest. Approximately 28,000 of these are given CPR and less than one in ten victims survive to go home from hospital.

In October 2015 the UK resuscitation council updated their guidelines in the ever increasing drive to improve overall survival rates.

Current Guidelines:

Aim’s

  • Strengthen the community response to cardiac arrest through training.
  • Increase the use of AED’s which can double the chance of survival.
  • Highlight the critical link between the emergency medical dispatcher, bystander CPR & deployment of an AED.

Stat’s

  • Cardiac arrests occur in a quarter to a third of patients having a heart attack within the first hour of the onset of chest pain.
  • Immediate CPR can double or quadruple survival from out of hospital cardiac arrests. Despite evidence roughly only 40% of victims receive bystander CPR within the UK.
  • Defibrillation within 3-5 minutes of collapse can increase survival rates to 50-70%. In the UK fewer than 2% of people have an AED attached before the arrival of paramedics.
Tom Aed

Current Protocol

The Resuscitation Council decided to maintain the 2010 protocol when delivering CPR to a victim of cardiac arrest. Adult’s should continue to receive both compressions and breaths (30:2) when trained bystanders are delivering CPR. Non trained individuals or those not willing can deliver compression only CPR.

Children should be given 5 initial breaths, followed by 30 chest compressions and then the normal ratio of 30:2. Individuals not trained in paediatric first aid can deliver the adult protocol, which is far better than not taking any action at all.

Bystanders should be suspicious of cardiac arrest in seizure like episodes until it has been proven the victim is breathing. Cardiac arrests can be mistaken for epilepsy in some cases due to a crossover of symptoms when a lack of oxygen reaches the brain.

Recommendations

  • Resuscitation training to be incorporated into the school syllabus to increase participation and overall survival rates.
  • Everyone who is physically able too should learn CPR.
  • Defibrillators should be more readily available & owners should register location with local ambulance service.
  • Better systems are implemented to enable ambulance services to deploy the nearest defibrillator to the scene of a cardiac arrest.

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