Bystanders who start CPR on children before paramedics arrive can save lives and limit brain damage, regardless of whether they do the old-fashioned type of CPR with chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth or the newer “hands-only” CPR, a study from Japan confirms.
In the study of children who had suffered cardiac arrest outside a hospital, those who received any CPR were about three times more likely to survive than those who did not get CPR.
People who received detailed audio instructions on how to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) demonstrated better compression rate, hand placement and compression depth than those who did not receive recorded instructions by cell phone. The results of the study are published today online in Annals of Emergency Medicine (“Cell Telephone Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation: Audio Instructions When Needed by Lay Rescuers: A Randomized, Controlled Trial”).
Talk about your amazing CPR stories. This man suffered from sudden cardiac arrest, and the doctor did not give up. He had been dead, but now he is living back at home in Brooklyn. It took 47 minutes of CPR: 4,500 chest compressions and eight zaps with a defibrillator (AED) to bring him back, but they never gave up hope. Could this story alter our views of the effectiveness of CPR, and the ability for someone to recover from a cardiac arrest?
Getting an AED for your company, for only a few thousand dollars, can be the difference between life and death. One person that knows this very well is stockbroker David Browne. Located in Australia, he drives a silver-grey sports car and owns one of the top wineries on the Bellarine Peninsula in Australia. But his life would have been over right now, had he not made a purchase that cost him less than $5000. That purchase was an automated external defibrillator, or AED. He made the investment about three years ago, and it saved his life.
Running Tolhurst Group, Australia’s oldest stockbroking company, he is 63 years old. On Friday, March 27th, he was running a meeting in the boardroom. After the meeting he went for a cup of tea, which he remembers beginning to pour, but that’s all. He had a sudden cardiac arrest. His heart had stopped beating.
Simply writing this blog entry is a manifestation of what I’m thinking about right now. As I sat down to contemplate some philosophical, far sighted slant on pop political or corporate interest; I am distracted by the fact that a very interesting phenomenon has occurred in my life.
I’ve turned 40.
I know that I’ve turned forty because as I sat at my computer, watching the very beginnings of the new day wrestle with the lazy star filled skies of night, a notion to turn on some extremely invigorating Kenny Tamplin came to mind. As the coffee maker’s trickling sounds melted into screeching guitar licks surrounded by driving base chords and a drum like a monotonic jack hammer filled the office space, my mind became cluttered, scattered and reckless. I couldn’t formulate the feelings and thoughts I was about to write anymore. My blood pressure became elevated, evident by the restlessness of my hands and the full hot feeling in my ears and neck.
In case you missed it, we sent out a press release on Tuesday morning regarding our mission to help people learn the skills that they can use to save the lives of family, friends, co-workers and others that may require CPR.
Here is the first part of the press release:
Everyone knows that taking a CPR class is a good idea, but nobody seems to have the time. Now you can learn CPR without leaving home.
Grand Rapids, MI (PRWEB) September 23, 2008 — High quality video-based CPR training is now being offered for free to anyone with Internet access at www.ProCPR.org.
According to statistics provided by the American Heart Association, about 75 to 80 percent of all sudden cardiac arrests happen at home. Knowing what to do in the case of an emergency could mean the difference between life and death for a loved one.
Now Roy Shaw, a licensed paramedic and co-founder of ProCPR.org, is determined to make this life saving training available to anyone who is willing to take the time to learn. According to Roy, “No price can be placed on the value of a life. The Internet is helping us break down the barriers that exist with classroom training.” Upon completing the program, Morgan Schäaf, a C.N.A. from Jacksonville, FL, wrote, “I found the training much more interesting and plausible than the traditional classroom experience. I’m going to recommend this to everybody I know!”
You can read more of the press release here or here.
If you’re not yet convinced that you should be well prepared to put your CPR skills to practice, we’ve found a story on the website “5 Minutes for Mom” called Have you ever had to use CPR? in which they talk about CPR review videos like the ones we have on ProCPR and ProHomeSafety.
They also have a story from a year prior called How Well Do You Know CPR? that details a scare that one of the writers had. She talks about how she wants to know more than she does about CPR, and wants to stay on top of her things in case anything should happen again.
We send out a free weekly CPR refresher e-mail that you can use to watch one of our training videos every week to stay sharp in your training. Feel free to sign up to receive those. If you want, you can also go through our full video training libraries both at ProCPR.org, and ProFirstAid.com where we also have water safety training and more.
There is new research showing that people are not only learning about medical conditions and symptoms from TV shows, but also retaining that information for at least six weeks after.
To measure the impact of health messages in medical dramas, researchers worked with the writers of “Grey’s Anatomy” to embed a health message in an episode of the popular program. In this case, the storyline involved a pregnant woman who was HIV positive, and the message was that she had a 98 percent chance of having a healthy baby with the proper treatment.
Viewers of the episode completed a survey before and after the episode aired. What the researchers found was that while only 15 percent of viewers knew before the show that mother-to-child transmission of HIV was overwhelmingly preventable, 61 percent were familiar with this fact after viewing the episode.
A followup survey found that nearly half of viewers — 45 percent — retained this information six weeks later.
This is just another example of how video training, such as that found at ProCPR, is helpful, and can aid in the retention of facts.
This is a clip from the old television show, Rescue 911, in which a sixth grader performs CPR when his teacher has a heart attack in class. This segment was taken from Episode 423 which aired April 13, 1993 on CBS.
It’s amazing to see this now, knowing how much CPR has and has not changed since 1993. Enjoy!
An 18-year-old, equipped with the valuable knowledge of how to perform CPR, saved the life of a 63-year-old in a clothing store in Newburyport, Mass.
How did he know CPR? He’d just completed a Newburyport High School graduation requirement – a CPR class.
Now the families of both the rescuer and the rescued are united in getting a bill passed that would make it mandatory that all high school students complete a CPR class before being allowed to graduate.
Bystanders who start CPR on children before paramedics arrive can save lives and limit brain damage, regardless of whether they do the old-fashioned type of CPR with chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth or the newer “hands-only” CPR, a study from Japan confirms.
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