AHA forges new alliance to increase cardiac arrest survival rates

By EMS1 Staff

DALLAS — The American Heart Association and other international health organizations created the Global Resuscitation Alliance to increase cardiac survival rates worldwide. This week, they outlined four recommendations towards their goal of increasing cardiac arrest survival rates by 50 percent.

According to the AHA, cardiac arrest is a global health problem that kills an estimated one million people annually in high resource countries. Cardiac arrests may be countered by the timely initiation of CPR and the use of an AED, but a patient’s chance for survival drops by 10 percent after each minute without CPR.

Since cardiac arrests are time-critical events, the Global Resuscitation Alliance is focusing on delivering patient intervention as quickly as possible to improve survival rates.

The organization points to the Seattle, Washington King County EMS as a leading example for how cardiac arrests should be handled. Due to the highly-trained staff and protocols developed under the guidance of Dr. Mickey Eisenberg, the area reached a record 62 percent survival rate for bystander-witnessed cardiac arrest caused by ventricular fibrillation. In comparison, the national average is about 40 percent.

With King County as a model, the Global Resuscitation Alliance offers four key recommendations to increase cardiac arrest survival rates:

1. Dispatch first responders more rapidly. Process improvements may shave more than a minute in some emergency response dispatch centers.
2. Standardize the practice of dispatcher-assisted CPR. Ensure that 911 call centers know how to telephonically identify cardiac arrest and provide CPR instructions to callers. Both hands-only CPR and conventional CPR can double or triple a cardiac response victim’s chance of survival.
3. Continue to improve high-quality CPR. Healthcare providers should conduct regular practice as individuals and a team to ensure high-quality CPR as outlined in the 2015 AHA Guidelines Update for CPR and Emergency Cardiovascular Care.
4. Create a culture of leadership. Many of the improvements needed to strengthen the chain of survival require commitment from the community’s leadership. The Alliance seeks to inform and inspire relevant leaders on how to adopt a continuous improvement model of thinking.

“It takes a tremendous amount of coordination to shape systems of emergency care that perform optimally,” said John J. Meiners, Chief of AHA Mission Aligned Business. “We’ve made good progress in the United States, and we hope to see continuous improvement in cardiac arrest survival rates as we share science and best practices around the world.”