No more “P” in CPR

When I used to be a nursing student, my boyfriend’s grandmother suffered cardiopulmonary arrest in front of me. After a second or two of shock and telling myself I could not imagine this was happening to me, I told my boyfriend to call 9-1-1, then moved her from the bed to the ground and commenced CPR. After several sets of chest compressions and rescue respiration, she vomited into my mouth. They actually didn’t teach me that something like this might occur in CPR class! When paramedics arrived, she was defibrillated, her rhythm and heart rate restored, and he or she was taken to the hospital. When I told several people what had happened, they told me that there was no way they might do CPR on someone because they might never get the right ratio of compressions to breaths and so they were also afraid they could catch something from victims or cause vomiting within the mouth. As we already know, lay individuals are often reluctant to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation for these reasons.

Today, an article was published within the New England Journal of Medicine that may hopefully change the best way laypeople view CPR. The multicenter, randomized trial involved 1,941 patients who were randomly assigned to one in every of two groups to receive chest compressions only or chest compressions and rescue respiration. According to the study, the outcomes support a layman’s CPR strategy that emphasizes chest compressions and minimizes the role of rescue breaths.

What does this mean for the layman by way of cardiopulmonary resuscitation? Chest compressions are the priority. Press hard, fast, and don’t stop until the person wakes up, the rescuer is simply too drained to proceed, or help arrives. It can be interesting to see if more bystanders are willing to leap in and perform chest compressions on individuals who go into cardiac arrest outside of a healthcare setting. Giving the victim a little bit “push” could also be the correct option to improve their future.

Posted by Anne Dabrow Woods, MSN, RN, CRNP, ANP-BC