North East Ambulance Service takes resuscitation to heart
North East Ambulance Service (NEAS) is investing £1m in patient care over the next 5 years with the purchase of new defibrillators for its’ 142 emergency ambulances.
Last year the service’s emergency care crews responded to nearly 300,000 incidents that resulted in a patient being taken to hospital and they treated and discharged 85,000 patients at home. Around 3,000 of those needed CPR.
Patients who have suffered a cardiac arrest or a heart attack will benefit most from the investment.
The new defibrillators will give staff instantaneous feedback on the quality of their Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation.
Consultant paramedic at NEAS, Paul Aitken-Fell, said: “Other parts of the world have better rates of survival for patients with a system wide approach to cardiac arrest. Advancements in defibrillator technology mean that this investment will improve the outcomes for patients and enable us to also monitor our CPR effectiveness at the scene of an incident.”
The Trust is also investing in new electronic patient care record technology, which will connect to the defibrillator and generate a complete care record of emergency care given to the receiving hospital.
Aitken-Fell added: “On average our paramedics only attend 3 to 4 cardiac arrests a year and because they get such a limited exposure to such incidents, giving them more support when delivering CPR at a scene can really make a difference to patients. Our crews can be faced with any number of complex conditions and it’s crucial that we equip them with the best tools for the job.”
North East Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (NEAS) covers 3,200 square miles across the North East region. It employs more than 2,500 staff and serves a population of 2.7 million people by handling all NHS 111 and 999 calls for the region, operating patient transport and ambulance response services, delivering training for communities and commercial audiences and providing medical support cover at events.
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Notes to editors
Notes to editors:
Media contact: Sam Reed at North East Ambulance Service on Email: sam.reed@neas.nhs.uk, Tel: 0191 4302099.
A cardiac arrest is essentially a failure of the heart's electrical system. The likelihood of a satisfactory outcome diminishes with the passage of time. The only intervention which can restore a normal heartbeat is an electrical counter shock or defibrillation. A patient should receive such treatment within a matter of minutes in order to improve the patient outcome. For every minute defibrillation is delayed approximately 10% of victims will die.
This critically short timeframe can be expanded if effective cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is provided by a bystander, but the internationally recognised target is to defibrillate within 5 minutes for out of hospital arrests and within 3 minutes for in-hospital arrests.
A heart attack victim, unlike the victim of a cardiac arrest, usually remains conscious. Whilst the onset of symptoms may be sudden and acute, a heart attack is not a sudden and complete event. It is rather a process of injury leading to heart cell death which whilst it may continue for up to 24 hours is usually 90% complete at 6 hours. The mechanism of injury is not electrical but rather a blockage of one or more major heart arteries resulting in oxygen deprivation of an area of heart cells, which over time progresses from injury of the affected cells ultimately to their death.
The critical patient intervention is the clearing of the blocked artery either through the administration of drugs, known as thrombolytic therapy, or through a surgical procedure involving inflation of a tiny balloon in the blocked artery called primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI). Whilst the goal is to undertake this intervention as quickly as possible (as the extent of cell death is progressive) to have any significant impact this must usually be achieved within 150 minutes. Across the North East there are two PPCI units in Newcastle and Middlesbrough
About North East Ambulance Service
North East Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (NEAS) covers 3,200 square miles across the North East region. It employs more than 2,500 staff and serves a population of 2.7 million people by handling all NHS 111 and 999 calls for the region, operating patient transport and ambulance response services, delivering training for communities and commercial audiences and providing medical support cover at events.
In 2015/16 the service answered 1.160 million emergency 999 and NHS 111 calls, responded to 295,855 incidents that resulted in a patient being taken to hospital, treated and discharged, 19,949 patients with telephone advice and treated and discharged 85,021 patients at home. In the same year, emergency care crews reached 132,948 Red incidents within the national target of 8 minutes.