Do you think where you live improves or decreases your chances of surviving a heart attack? Well, a recent study looked at chances of surviving a heart attack depending on where you live, and this is from the University of Michigan research study.
They looked into certain neighborhoods in an area of Georgia and found that some of these places where they had incidences of cardiac arrest that there are 2 or 3 times higher rates of cardiac arrest and poor survival of those cardiac arrests in some neighborhoods than others and it may have to do with a lot of different things including the education level of bystanders, the number of bystanders trained to do something as simple as CPR.
In residences where patients had a higher risk of heart attack were more likely to have first responders around, were more likely to have bystanders or people nearby, family members, neighbors whatever, who had learned CPR and so it goes to talk about not just environmental factors in the sense of things that might increase your chances of heart attack but it went to look at survival rates related to community impact and influences. This certainly looks very carefully at things like cardiac arrest and CPR education in a community and I’m a big proponent of more CPR education in the community.
As a nurse, it’s something-we may not do CPR very often in the nursing field unless you’re an ER nurse or an ICU nurse or working in a situation where you have high acuity patients, there are a lot of nurses who never do CPR. In my other side of my health care persona as a paramedic, we do CPR all the time and I know 16-year olds that have joined the fire company within 6 months have done CPR on 4 or 5 cardiac arrests.
Certainly, a different outlook on things but one thing we see in the EMS sector is that many many patients go 5,6,7,8 minutes before we arrive to begin CPR when there are family members and other bystanders around. Is it because they didn’t know CPR? Is it because they weren’t comfortable doing it even if they knew it? We’re not really sure, but certainly this study shows that for areas where people were more likely to have training in CPR and more likely to have responders close by, those people had better survival rates. Not really a surprise, but certainly an indication that we can do more to educate and get more bystander CPR done and improve outcomes at least in that way.
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This article has been featured in the news segment of the Nursing Show podcast episode Nursing Care of Pediatric Poisoning and Episode 137
