It is 4:37 PM. As a mother places her seven-week old baby in a baby swing and the baby stops breathing. The mother has never taken a CPR class and has no idea what to do in this situation. She runs to the next door neighbor’s apartment because she is aware that he is an EMT. The neighbor steps into her apartment and takes the baby from the father to start basic interventions and tells the mother to call 911. Within 2 minutes, the baby starts to breath on her own and returns to a normal color as they wait for the Paramedics to arrive. Though the outcome was good, this situation could have had serious implications. The neighbor could have not been home. The mom might have waited too long to call 911. Paramedics could have been too far away to arrive at the apartment to perform lifesaving interventions in time. A series of events could have seriously changed the life of this seven-week old baby forever.
The chain of survival. In 1996, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) published a document outlining the “chain of survival” that is needed to
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If more people were proficient in CPR, we could start to see these numbers drop and show a better outcome for people that enter cardiac arrest. We also have AED’s (Automated External Defibrillator) more widely available in public places because it was found that the average person is only in a shockable heart rhythm called Ventricular Fibrillation or Ventricular Tachycardia, also known as V-Fib or V-Tach, for about 7 minutes. Once an irregular rhythm starts, chances of survival drop approximately 7% for each passing minute that a cardiac patient is not shocked. (Pollak 2011) Once a patient goes into full arrest, meaning the heart in no longer moving at all, AED’s are useless and the patient needs advanced life support ASAP: therefore, early use of an AED in the pre-hospital setting plays a major role in helping a patient