Heart stopping

Change of heart vital to stopping needless cardiac arrest deaths

Well, I didn't know this before:

Each year, about 3800 people have a cardiac arrest in NSW. A staggering 90 per cent of them don't survive. But, with these three measures in place, we can drastically improve the survival rates across NSW. We can save lives.

In the US city of Seattle, 48 per cent of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest victims survive. This is almost five times better than the rate in NSW.

Seattle has achieved this impressive feat by providing extensive CPR training to the public, rolling out a network of publicly accessible defibrillators and creating a cardiac arrest registry; the same measures the Australian Resuscitation Council NSW is asking to be implemented here.

Cardiac arrest accounts for 10 times more fatalities than road deaths. Yet while the road accident toll has been slashed in recent decades, cardiac arrest survival rates remain worryingly static. Our success in reducing road deaths shows what a tremendous impact a concerted, targeted and well-resourced public health campaign can have.

We know what we need to do to reduce hundreds of needless deaths each year from cardiac arrest. Now we just need the support of the government to do it.

He mentions Queensland and Victoria as being a bit more advanced than NSW in setting up a defibrillator network.  I must admit, I did see one somewhere recently and was a bit surprised.  They are all over the place in Japan, but I assumed that was just Japanese safety overkill, and did not realise that there may be known good outcomes in cities that have set up these programs.