Does CPR Really Save Lives?
By Jared Caldwell, CEO and Training Center Director, TELSSI, Inc
When I first began teaching in 1989, CPR was something people had “heard of” but didn’t really necessarily know about unless they had reason to directly encounter the training in their life. Now however, the term is common knowledge amongst high-school students, and adults in general are familiar with what it involves (I suppose ER and Baywatch might be due for some credit to some degree- just don’t imitate the way they do it).
Heart Disease was the number one killer of Americans every year back then (having a heart attack was the American Way To Die) but, if you were to have a heart attack, King County in Washington state was the place to do it. They had a program for teaching CPR to every citizen free of charge- the homeless guys on the street knew CPR- and your chances of survival were higher there than anywhere else in the country.
Not much has changed in how we die as a country- we still resist efforts to improve our diets exercise and, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Heart Disease is the leading cause of death in men and women across nationalities in the United States. King County is no longer the place in the nation with the highest cardiac arrest survival odds; at a rate of over 62%, it is the number one place in the world to survive a heart attack, and other areas have taken note. While you may only have a 3% survival rate in Detroit, Michigan or 18% in Dallas, Texas, in places like North Carolina- where the entire state is implementing public CPR training programs- rates of survival have increased state-wide by 6% over five years.
Consider that for just a moment- simply by training the population in CPR, their rate of surviving Sudden Cardiac Arrest increased by two times what the city of Detroit has total. The data, tracked since the 1970s, shows consistently that the involvement of bystanders trained in CPR is directly linked to survival in the event of cardiac arrest, and that increasing the number of people trained in CPR increases the likelihood that someone near the victim of a heart attack will be both present and willing to perform life-saving CPR.
In Colorado, a state with thousands of people visiting the backcountry and parks every weekend in the summer (when lightning strikes are frequent), and ski resorts in the winter, we only have statistical data on survival rates in Colorado Springs (6.4% with only 4% of the population trained). In Denver where TELSSI is based, we only have 11% of our population trained but, unfortunately, no hard data on survival rates; national patterns suggest that it probably isn’t very good.
Take the time (just four hours) to participate in a CPR class; have a dinner party with friends and schedule an instructor to come after (I happen to know one who will come to your home and do this), get your office to sponsor a class and train a group at your place of business (I know an instructor who will do this), get your prenatal group together for an infant course, or the parents of your daycare together for a babysitting class (I know someone who specializes in these too), but take a course and save a life. You never know- it may just be someone in your own family.
To schedule a class for your group, please contact us!
References:
National Center for Health Statistics. Health, United States, 2015: With Special Feature on Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. Hyattsville, MD. 2016; http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus15.pdf#019
USA Today Report, Bob Davis. The State of Emergency medical Services Across the USA, How 50 Major Cities Stack Up; http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/graphics/life/gra/ems/flash.htm
The New York Times, Kira Peikoff. CPR Rates Can Vary Greatly By City; http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/health/cpr-survival-rates-can-differ-greatly-by-city.html?_r=0
U.S. News and World Report, Robert Preidt. Statewide Training on Cardiac Arrest Saves Lives in N. Carolina; http://health.usnews.com/health-news/articles/2016-03-23/statewide-training-on-cardiac-arrest-saves-lives-in-n-carolina
King County, Public Health News. King County Has World's Highest Survival Rate for Cardiac Arrest; http://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/health/news/2014/May/19-cardiac-survival.aspx