People who suffer a cardiac arrest in Denmark today are three times more likely to survive than a decade ago, thanks largely to a national effort to teach and encourage bystanders to step in and perform CPR.
In 2005 Denmark launched a national effort to teach its residents to perform CPR to save people who suffer a cardiac arrest outside a hospital. The effort included introducing mandatory training for elementary school students and people getting driver’s licenses, distributing instructional training kits, offering telephone guidance to bystanders and placing AEDs in public places.
In Denmark, the number of cardiac-arrest victims who received “bystander” CPR (from someone other than a health professional) more than doubled, from 22% in 2001 to 45% in 2010.
In the same time period, the percentage of cardiac-arrest victims who arrived at a hospital alive increased from 8% to 22%.
The percentage of patients alive after 30 days tripled, from 3.5% to 11%. The percentage of patients alive after one year also more than tripled, from 3% in 2001 to 10% in 2010.
“The main message from this study is that national initiatives to improve cardiac arrest management seem to have an impact with an increase in bystander CPR rates and survival rates,” says Dr. Mads Wissenberg, the study’s lead author from Copenhagen University Hospital Gentofte.
Come join us in May 2016, to hear more about the amazing results on survival from cardiac arrest and help us to use the science to improve even more – from science to survival.
