Changing Cardiac Arrest Dispatch
The Richmond Ambulance Authority is back in the news. They do good things down there and really keep up with what’s going on in advanced research in EMS. One of the things they are looking at is improving the time it takes 911 callers to get to chest compressions on a cardiac arrest call.
Bystander Time to CPR Start
You think about it. It takes a couple of minutes to go through the typical dispatch call. Even in a cardiac arrest, it takes several minutes to gather information and then teach the caller to begin compressions. But if you have a cardiac arrest patient, time is so valuable.
The Richmond Ambulance Authority cooperation with University of Oslo in Norway went ahead and looked at the dispatch questions that were being asked. They figured out that the Medical Priority Dispatch System (MPDS) could be changed, streamlining the process and getting hands on that patient and start compressions one full minute sooner.
100 More CPR Chest Compressions
Think about that: One full minute is 100 more compressions before EMS walks through the door. We all know that early CPR is one of the most important parts of that chain of survival. We need to continue to find ways to improve and it doesn’t just come down to us improving our care of a patient in the way we handle cardiac arrest. Whether it’s our pit crew approach or looking at our compression fraction (the amount of time were spending on and off the chest), there are also other things that feed into that quest for improvement. This is one good example.
System-Wide Approach to Improvement
We need to look at a system-wide approach to care and figure out how every part of our system can lead to more functional and successful cardiac arrest management. Hopefully this will add up to better patient outcomes with more neurologically intact patients walking out of the hospital at the other end of resuscitation from cardiac arrest. This is really exciting.
I’m looking forward to this reaching my dispatch system. They put forward this information to go into the Medical Priority Dispatch System and the most recent version has been upgraded to include these recommendations so your system may be seeing this going to affect very soon.
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For links to this news item and the full episode video and audio version of this show visit — Diltiazem ACLS Review and Episode 303.
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