12 Mar 2011
Upgrade tailored to needs of Singaporeans, aim to improve cardiac arrest survival rate
FORGET checking a person's pulse to determine if he has suffered a cardiac arrest.
Every second counts in the successful revival of an afflicted person, and the high degree of error in pulse-checking and the long time it takes makes it an obstacle to the person's survival.
The removal of pulse-checking is one of the changes to Singapore's resuscitation guidelines, officially introduced by the National Resuscitation Council (NRC) yesterday. The changes were made to improve the quality and timeliness of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in Singapore.
The NRC is the accreditation body for all cardiac life-support training centres here.
Speaking at the two-day National Resuscitation Guidelines Conference 2011 held at the Spring Singapore auditorium yesterday, NRC chairman V. Anantharaman said the new guidelines have been tailored to meet the needs of Singaporeans.
They were made after the release of guidelines by the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation in October last year.
Explained Professor Anantharaman: "One should not simply adopt wholesale guideline recommendations put out by one country and presume that the same would be equally applicable everywhere."
For instance, it may take a longer time for an ambulance crew in Singapore to reach a cardiac-arrest patient compared to, say, a less urbanised place in the United States due to traffic conditions.
This means that CPR intervention by a member of the public is more crucial in the interim. A patient's chance of survival drops by 7 per cent to 10 per cent with every passing minute without some form of intervention.
The changes to the guidelines, which simplify the steps involved in performing CPR, also included removing the need to check the patient's mouth for foreign objects before starting resuscitation.
CPR uses a combination of chest compression – to get the heart to start pumping – and mouth-to-mouth transfer of oxygen.
On average, the survival rate here for people who collapse from sudden cardiac arrest outside a hospital is about 2 per cent to 3 per cent each year. Of the 1,400 people who collapse here each year, only 30 to 40 survive.
Heart disease is the No. 2 cause of death in Singapore.
The new guidelines got the thumbs up from Associate Professor Lim Swee Han, 49, a senior consultant at the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Singapore General Hospital.
He said at the conference yesterday: "Simplification will improve skills retention, increase the willingness to perform CPR and decrease the fear of imperfect CPR performance."
The NRC estimated about 40,000 people went for CPR training in the past year. There are 40 training centres here.
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Dept of Emergency Medicine
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