The American Heart Association (AHA), the world’s top voluntary health organization against cardiovascular disease, recently released recommendations to improve standards of high-quality, timely CPR from dispatchers.
Dispatcher-assisted CPR is also called telephone CPR (T-CPR). Two keys to surviving cardiac arrest are early CPR and early 9-1-1 access. As of today, less than 50 percent of people who have cardiac arrest are able to gain CPR help from bystanders.
“The most immediate way to improve survival from cardiac arrest is to improve bystander CPR rates,” Dr. Michael Kurz, volunteer chair of the AHA's T-CPR Taskforce, said. “Providing telephone CPR saves lives by providing just-in-time bystander CPR instructions. When T-CPR instructions are not provided, preventable deaths from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest occur.”
The AHA has also released performance goals that will help to determine whether the new standards are successfully applied by first responders. The new program as well as its metrics will be open to public comment until Nov. 16 in order to improve survival rates of cardiac arrest.
“In telephone CPR, the dispatcher and the caller form a team in which the expertise of the telecommunicator, combined with the willingness of the caller to assist, strengthen the first two links in the chain of survival,” Kurz said.
