Photo by Advocate Health Care News Service
The survival rate for people who suffer cardiac arrest outside a hospital hovers around just 6 percent. But, it doesn’t have to be that low, a group of physicians urged in a new editorial.
“As a nation, we are falling far short in our efforts to improve survival for this exquisitely time-sensitive medical emergency,” lead author Dr. Bentley J. Bobrow, professor of emergency medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson and medical director for the Bureau of EMS and Trauma System in Arizona, wrote in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. “We can and must do far better.”
Funding for cardiac resuscitation research must be a national public health priority, the physicians urge.
They offer three steps to improving the national cardiac arrest survival rate in this infographic below. Dr. Thomas Discher, a cardiologist with Advocate Heart Institute at Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove, Ill., also weighs in.
