Take Heart Australia

Guest Post by Professor Paul Middleton, emergency physician and founder of Take Heart Australia I have spent the last 20 years practicing emergency medicine on the ground and in the air. I have attended countless cardiac arrests both in hospital and the pre-hospital setting; performed compressions on hundreds of chests; sent countless joules of energy through wobbling hearts, and squirted buckets of adrenaline into cannulae, IO needles and ET tubes…but I still have an empty feeling inside – I know we can do better. We hear about cardiac arrest all the time, and as clinicians working in emergency medicine and critical care we spend a larger part of our time dealing with the prevention, treatment, and outcomes of cardiac arrest than any other group. For the in-hospital cardiac arrest we are often incredibly well informed about the diagnostic synergies of gestalt and troponin, we may know about the predictive power of a lactate above 4 even in the presence of normal physiology, we can see the dysfunctional ventricle and the valvular regurgitation on our bedside echo, and we can avoid complications of intubation by our practiced use of NODESAT and bimanual laryngoscopy…. …but, the simple fact remains, that we are just not going to be there for the 30,000 Australians and 350,000 Americans who suffer cardiac arrest outside of the hospital setting. Communities in the US, such as Seattle and King County, WA, have a cardiac arrest survival rate of over 60% for ...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Tags: Cardiology Pre-hospital / Retrieval Website Chain of survival OOHCA Paul Middleton Professor Paul Middleton Take Heart Take Heart Australia Source Type: blogs