Resuscitation
-
To determine the reliability of pulse palpation to diagnose paediatric cardiac arrest. ⋯ Pulse palpation is unreliable to diagnose paediatric cardiac arrest. Rescuers misdiagnose on 22% of occasions and which may lead them to withhold external cardiac compression on 14% of occasions when needed and on 36% to give it when not needed. Brachial palpation is slightly more reliable than femoral palpation.
-
Approximately 750,000 in-hospital cardiac arrests occur annually in the United States. Many will occur to visitors or staff members within the hospital's public areas. We sought to provide a descriptive analysis of visitor cardiac arrests in hospitals and to compare survival outcomes to matching inpatient arrests. ⋯ Cardiac arrest among hospital visitors is a relatively common event. The survival outcomes of hospital visitors compared unfavorably to that of recently published experience with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest victims.
-
High oxygen increases morbidity and mortality. Current guidelines in Neonatal Resuscitation Programme (NRP) state if self-inflating bags are used with an input FiO2 of 1.0 without an oxygen reservoir a delivered safe FiO2 of approximately 0.40 is achieved. This conflicts with manufacturer findings (Laerdal infant resuscitator (LIR)). We assessed FiO2 delivery by the LIR, varying oxygen reservoir (OR) use, ventilation and input flowrates. ⋯ Our findings support the manufacturers performance specification that high input FiO2 results in high delivered FiO2 with/without an OR. These results dispute the 2006 NRP guidelines that state "in the absence of a reservoir (oxygen) the delivered oxygen is reduced to about 40%".