Excerpts from the ChicagoTribune.com:
Aurora Fire Department officials say they’ve had better results this year in getting people to resume breathing on their own again amid regional changes in emergency protocol requiring paramedics to treat cardiac arrest patients for a half hour on site before moving them to a hospital.
Dan Heineman of Aurora, a 46-year-old mechanic, is one of their success stories. Heineman, whose brother is a firefighter in another city, visited Aurora’s Station 3 on the city’s West Side to meet and thank those he credits with a second chance at life.
When Heineman went into cardiac arrest on a Friday evening, there had been warning signs. A couple weeks prior, he’d had pain in his jaw. Knowing what that could mean, he went to a doctor to get it checked out. But an electrocardiogram test (EKG) showed he wasn’t having a heart attack then, and they went back home.
On April 21, Heineman came home from work and didn’t feel well. The pain was back, and he was nauseous. He couldn’t get comfortable and ended up on the couch, with his head in his wife Francesca’s lap. That’s the last thing he remembers before waking up in an ambulance.
The fire department has seen 47 CPR calls this year compared with 90 for all of 2016. They track return of spontaneous circulation, which generally means a patient showed signs of breathing on their own again. Last year, Aurora’s return of circulation rate was 26 percent, and this year it’s 33 percent.
One factor in that increase is a mandated protocol handed down earlier this year by the Southern Fox Valley Emergency Medical Service System, which includes Aurora.
A news release introducing the 30-minute rule, quotes American Heart Association statistics saying 70 percent of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests happen in residential settings, 90 percent of people who experience cardiac arrest outside of hospitals don’t recover, and 39 percent of such people get the immediate help they need before professionals arrive.
thanks Dan
