Phone CPR Project : 112 LIEGE

Dispatcher-assisted telephone cardiopulmonary resuscitation using a French-language compression-only protocol: the ALERT algorithm

Early bystander-initiated cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is a key factor in improving survival from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, offering a potential 50% decrease in mortality. However, despite large-scale community training programs, citizen-CPR rates in case of witnessed arrest have persistently been low, and only one-third of the victims actually receive CPR before arrival of emergency medical services. One strategy initially aimed at increasing the frequency and improving the performance of bystander resuscitation has been to train emergency medical dispatchers to provide protocol-based telephone CPR assistance. Accordingly, the most recent guidelines have recommended such phone CPR protocols for dispatcher-assisted instructions for untrained bystanders and the Advanced Medical Priority Dispatch System (AMPDS), the most structured, state-of-the-art, dispatch system has been widely used in countries in which English is the primary language.
However, one important reason hindering the active promotion of phone CPR throughout Europe has been the lack of any validated translated phone CPR protocols.
Given the interest of compression-only CPR protocols, we previously designed a study in order to evaluate a specific French-language compression-only CPR algorithm named ALERT (for Algorithme Liègeois dEncadrement à la Réanimation Téléphonique- available at www.phonecpr.be). This preliminary study have clearly pointed out that the delivery of the ALERT algorithm have the potential to help French-language bystanders initiate first CPR, even in the absence of previous training. Furthermore, the same protocol may serve to guide volunteers with previous basic life support training to reach their best CPR performances.
On the basis of these encouraging results, we have translated the ALERT protocol in Dutch-language and initiated the training of the 112-dispatchers throughout the country. We further planed a complementary study on the impact of the application of this protocol on the clinical field.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• HEALTH
• PHONE
• CPR
• LIEGE