Operating the defibrillators did not require lots of training only five hours, plus a three hour refresher course every six months. There were no problems or complications involving the operators in around 1,000 interventions.
It was though, he said, too early to expect national healthcare systems to be interested in supporting an ELPIS (Emergency Lay Person-Integrated Service).
"In our study, over three-quarters of the victims whose collapse was witnessed received defibrillation more than eight minutes after cardiac arrest. National standards require 90% of victims to be reached within eight minutes. Even so, it is worth noting that patients who received defibrillation later than the eight-minute threshold, accounted for a third of the those who survived at one year free of any neurological problems."
Dr Cappato said this finding outlined the need both for strenuous resuscitation efforts to be made with current technology even past the eight-minute point and for re-evaluation of early defibrillation programmes.
Dr Antonio Curnis, Chief of Electrophysiology at the Civil Hospital in Brescia and co-author of the study, said: "To make ELPIS widely feasible, we need to prove larger survival rates are achievable. I think it's possible. The key lies in reducing the time between the person's collapse and the arrival of the rescue team. If we can get that down to within eight minutes we could have 15% of CA patients surviving long-term, free of neurological damage. That is a huge number of lives given the incidence of CA in a population.
"It will need better organisation of the logistics and manpower, and co-operation among people with different professional specialties. It's difficult, but it is possible."
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Contact: Margaret Willson
m.willson@mwcommunications.org.uk
44-153-677-2181
European Society of Cardiology
30-Nov-2005