September 1, 2007
BC Ambulance Service (BCAS) paramedics are playing a key role in the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (ROC), one of the most exciting resuscitation research initiatives ever conceived. Funded by government and not-for-profit agencies, ROC brings together 260 agencies from across North America for the purpose of investigating promising interventions that may improve survival from cardiac arrest and major trauma.
BCAS was one of the leading emergency medical service agencies in Canada to adopt and provide its paramedics with training in the new CPR Guidelines, announced in 2005 by the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation and the American Heart Association. One of the major changes introduced through the guidelines was to increase "hands-on" time or the fraction of time with active chest compressions.
While many small studies have supported the concept of increased hands on time, ROC is the first large human study to relate chest compression fraction to survival. BCAS' contribution to this important research was recognized in November 2007, when Dr. Jim Christenson, VP of Medical Programs, presented the first ROC scientific abstract at the International Resuscitation Symposium in Orlando.
Incorporating data from the Cardiac Arrest Epistry, the abstract relates the proportion of time spent compressing the chest (hands-on time or chest compression fraction) with the odds of survival to hospital discharge in 484 cases of ventricular fibrillation (the cause of cardiac arrest). BC played a significant role in this groundbreaking research, providing almost 60% of the CPR data downloads used in the analysis. The data collected is the strongest evident yet that in real pre-hospital resuscitation, maximizing hands-on time directly results in more survivors from cardiac arrest.
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