Ordinary citizens need to raise their awareness about cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and other similar techniques to increase the survival rate of people with heart arrests, experts said Thursday.
“A first witness plays a significant role in treating cardiac arrest patients with the ‘golden time,’ which refers to four minutes after the occurrence,” said Professor Hwang Seong-oh황성오 of Yonsei University Wonju College of Medicine연세원주의대 at a seminar on CPR for citizens’ safety held in the National Assembly hall. “It is necessary to enhance people's awareness about CPR to increase their abilities to cope with the emergency situation.”
Professor Hwang said about 30,000 people suffer from cardiac arrests annually and only 5 percent of them survive. When a heart attack occurs, the survival rate of patients who received CPR from paramedic showed 1.5 times higher than those who didn’t get CPR. If the first witness does CPR before paramedic arrives at the scene, the survival rate is 2.5 times greater than not.
"Brain damage occurs five minutes after heart attack happened. A half hour later, it is almost impossible to survive, but it takes at least 20 minutes to take patients to hospitals,” Hwang said. “After all, the best way to increase the rate is to make the first witness recognize heart arrest and do CPR.”
The professor stressed the need for communities to train people about cardiac arrest and CPR.
“Recently, Automatic Electric Device (AED) for CPR education has become available in part, but its government-led distribution has limitations,” Hwang said. “Local communities have to educate and make survival programs thinking ‘how can make our communities safe from heart arrests.’”
He cited as the example the U.S. state of Massachusetts, which has made “HeartSafe Communities” program and operated a heart arrest survival program and spreads it to other communities. They conducted CPR education and AED education, which resulted in the witness CPR operation rate in Minnesota rising from 33 percent to 59 percent, Hwang noted.
“But it doesn’t mean local communities have to take the whole responsibility,” he said. “The government has to set up related laws and rules to provide budget, expert organizations should develop the CPR guidelines through research, and educational institutions ought to improve education quality as well as enhance popular awareness.”
Head Yoon Han-deok윤한덕, head of at the central emergency center of National Medical Center(NMC)국립중앙의료원, emphasized the government has to relieve non-medical professionals from the burdens of unexpected incidents, to help them actively conduct CPR.
“It is important to provide related education to increase heart arrest survival rate and make people recall it in the form of ‘lifecycle education,’” Yoon said. “One of the ways is to get the CPR training certificate with three years of people getting driving licenses.”
“Even an expert like me sometimes worries about ‘what I should do if heart attack patients are dead after getting my treatments. It isn’t easy for ordinary people to do CPR without hesitation,” he said. “It is necessary to educate and promote immunity provision in Article 5, Item 2 of the emergency medical law called the ‘Good Samaritan provision. According to the law, people who offer emergency treatment for patients with critical conditions don’t take responsibility even though problems occur.”
Yoon also pointed to the importance of managing AED and other devices.
“It is, of course, important to obligatorily deploy AED, but it has little meaning if people don’t know where it is and how to operate it,” he said. “The government has to tighten the duty of AED managers to keep it as a medical device.”