By Lisa Petrillo
Updated June 2015
The doc who wrote the book on emergency medical system success—Mickey Eisenberg, M.D., medical program director of King County EMS—along with Resuscitation Academy faculty, have released a new e-book, “10 Steps for Improving Survival from Sudden Cardiac Arrest.”
The free 79-page guide is loaded with videos, actual audio of calls and interactive resources aimed at improving survivability of one of the nation’s leading causes of death. “It’s not complicated,” says Eisenberg, “but it’s not easy.”
Recommendations include:
Establish a cardiac arrest registry. Include all aspects related to care, beyond just whether the patient lives or dies. Many systems have joined the national Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival.
Initiate dispatcher-assisted CPR. Endorsed by the American Heart Association, these programs train and provide continuing education in recognizing cardiac arrest and delivering CPR instruction.
Voice-record all attempted resuscitations. The object is to reconstruct events with accuracy in order to be able to ask with each case, “How can we do it better?”
Work toward a culture of excellence. “Though it may be to define or measure,” Eisenberg writes of this high-performance standard of care, “it is probably a key factor separating great systems from those that are merely satisfactory.”
Find the free downloads at resuscitationacademy.org (under ebook) and through iTunes under “Ten Steps for Improving” or this link: tinyurl.com/cw3bw5o.
