Cardiac Arrest
2020 American Heart Association (AHA) Guidelines for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) and Emergency Cardiovascular Care (ECC)
The 2020 Heart Association (AHA) Guidelines for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) and Emergency Cardiovascular Care (ECC) are a comprehensive revision of the AHA’s guidelines for adult, pediatric, neonatal, resuscitation education science, and systems of care topics. They have been developed for resuscitation providers and AHA instructors to focus on the resuscitation science and guidelines recommendations that are most significant or controversial, or those that will result in resuscitation training and practice changes and provide the rationale for the recommendations.
Highlights
“Top 10 Changes” Project: CPR & ECC Guidelines Infographic Series
2020 AHA Algorithms
Paediatric Resuscitation Guidelines
The pediatric assessment triangle, provides a valuable checklist that we should go through for every child we see in the ED to help us assess their risk of crashing. The pediatric assessment triangle is based solely on observing the child from the foot of the bed.
Adrenaline: It’s just a suggestion
Epinephrine and other ACLS drugs lead to more patients with ROSC but no increase in the number of patients with good neurologic outcomes after OHCA.
Something that’s very interesting is the actual 2015 ACLS recommendation for epinephrine. It reads, “it is reasonable to consider administering a 1 mg dose of IV/IO epinephrine every 3 to 5 minutes during adult cardiac arrest.” This actually leaves room to not give the medication if the physician thinks it should be withheld.
Traumatic Cardiac Arrests
Traumatic Cardiac Arrests (TCAs), unlike medical causes of cardiac arrest, typically stem from a brief list of causes: severe head trauma, hypovolemia, tension pneumothorax, pericardial tamponade, and upper airway obstruction.
