Listener Tim (our Australian nurse contact) sent me an article link about updates to the CPR guidelines in the news lately. The importance of compressions and adequate CPR is of paramount importance to survivability of cardiac arrest.

Here’s the link he sent my way.

The article here talks about the importance of priming the heart before it will be receptive to shock. The article talks about 200 compressions being the magic number.

This has been in the works for some time and actually jives with what we’ve been implementing since the 2005 rollout. Studies show that when compressions stop for more than 10 seconds, the myocardium rapidly loses the ability to receive a shock. By association then, the unwitnessed arrests out there need to re-prime the cardiac muscle before a shock is delivered.

In the prehospital arena with EMTs and paramedics we accomplish this by getting right on the chest and performing good CPR while getting the pads on and checking the rhythm. The time to get the defibrillator out and deployed is at least two minutes (200 compressions at the CPR rate of 100 per minute).