Bystanders deliver on CPR

We found that following these four years of initiatives to improve care and outcomes for cardiac arrest patients, the proportion of patients who received bystander CPR and first responder defibrillation increased by more than 25% to approximately 50%, the combination of bystander CPR and first responder defibrillation increased from 14% to 23%.

The best results came if someone started CPR and if EMS arrived quickly and used a defibrillator, the researchers found.

In total, around 86% received CPR before they reached hospital and out of them, 46% had received CPR from bystander and 41% from first responder like a police officer or firefighter. In an email to TIME, study author Dr. Carolina Malta Hansen of the Duke Clinical Research Institute said that while they can’t give a definitive reason for the association, it’s possible that when a bystander steps in, a person receives CPR much faster than if a bystander doesn’t, and that could make a difference.

The researchers hope that there will be more emphasis on CPR education to let other people become less reluctant to help. However, in states that have “Good Samaritan” laws people are protected from being sued, she said. “No matter what you do, the person in cardiac arrest is dead”. Ordinary people should know that their intervention is decisive to increase the chance of survival and can’t do any harm.

The report was published July 21 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. This causes the heart to beat erratically or to stop beating. In that scenario, he needs CPR so that blood continues to flow throughout the body.

And this helped survival – the number of people who lived without brain damage rose from 3.3 percent of cases to 8.2 percent. And both studies also show that more bystanders are getting involved.

The study included 4,961 patients with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest identified in the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival between 2010 and 2013.

For the study, Hansen and colleagues analyzed almost 5,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrest cases in 11 North Carolina counties from 2010-2013. During that time period, the state launched a campaign called The HeartRescue Project, which encourages bystander chest-compression CPR-the new gold-standard form of resuscitation-and the use of automated external defibrillators. That is likely because more AED’s are available, and because you can do compression-only CPR. Like the Duke paper, this study by Dr. Shinji Nakahara and colleagues at Kanagawa University of Human Services found that bystander help impacted survival rates. “This program shows that state and national programs to improve care of cardiac arrest, with a focus on the community and emergency medical response, can save more lives”.

Of 1,648 defibrillated patients, 53.9 percent were defibrillated before arrival of the EMS – 6.9 percent by bystanders and 47 percent by first-responders. Bystanders may feel uncomfortable or shocked, leading them to freeze up and forgo performing CPR in lieu of waiting for medical professionals to arrive and perform first aid. First-responder defibrillation increased significantly from 40.9 percent in 2010 52.1 percent in 2013.