Resuscitation
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Editorial Comment
Auditing resuscitation performance: innovating to improve practice.
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In 2007, the Ishikawa Medical Control Council initiated the continuous quality improvement (CQI) project for telephone-assisted cardiopulmonary resuscitation (telephone-CPR), which included instruction on chest-compression-only CPR, education on how to recognise out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCAs) with agonal breathing, emesis and convulsion, recommendations for on-line or redialling instructions and feedback from emergency physicians. This study aimed to investigate the effect of this project on the incidence of bystander CPR and the outcomes of OHCAs. ⋯ The CQI project for telephone-CPR increased the incidence of bystander CPR and improved the outcome of OHCAs. A CQI project appeared to be essential to augment the effects of telephone-CPR.
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The aim of this study is to use genetic mutation analysis to determine the cause of sudden unexpected death in young (SUDY) persons with normal autopsy findings, and to provide relatives with an identified cardiac mutation with suitable cardiovascular prevention. ⋯ Cardiac/genetic evaluation of relatives long after SUDY can reveal a diagnosis in 5/25 (20%) of cases. Since DNA extraction of formalin fixed paraffin embedded samples is unreliable, it is important that blood or tissue samples be stored at autopsy of such cases. This can facilitate establishing a diagnosis and thereby save lives in the future.