Is CPR always appropriate? A personal perspective from working in East Africa

摘要

The UK has a sophisticated healthcare infrastructure, with a rapidly responsive ambulance service and advanced emergency care facilities. This allows CPR to be delivered as part of the broader'chain of survival'. This widely used term, chain of survival, describes all the steps that are required to ensure the greatest chance of surviving (American Heart Association, 2017) and includes early recognition, early CPR, early defibrillation and access to advanced post-resuscitation care. Despite this, the survival rate for an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in the England in 2014 was 8.6% (British Heart Foundation et al, 2014).This refers only to survival to hospital discharge and includes people who may be permanently disabled.