Original contribution
Development and implementation of emergency CPR instruction via telephone

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We developed a cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) message that can be given via telephone by emergency dispatchers directly to an individual reporting a cardiac arrest. The message was developed and evaluated on the basis of empirical observation of CPR performance of 203 community volunteers during simulated cardiac arrest events. The majority of volunteers were women, aged 30 to 80 years, who had not had previous CPR training. An average of five ventilation and compression cycles were given within five minutes using telephone instruction. We judged the quality of CPR to be comparable to the performance of individuals who have received formal training. The specific words used in the message directly determined adequacy of performance, and resulted in significantly better CPR performance than did impromptu instruction offered by professional dispatchers (P ⩽ .02).

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    Others choose to use locally developed systems for instructing callers in CPR. The most notable of these community-developed systems is the one used in Seattle, Washington, where significant research on dispatcher CPR has been conducted.8–12 Still other communities do not offer any pre-arrival instructions.

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    2017, American Journal of Emergency Medicine
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    The rate of bystander CPR varies greatly among communities from 10% to 65% [13]. To improve this situation in the early 1970s, the idea of Dispatcher-assisted CPR (DACPR) or telephone CPR was first conceived [14]. International Guidelines for Resuscitation 2015 [15] recommend DACPR because it improves bystander CPR rates [16-20], increases the number of chest compressions delivered [20] and improves patient outcomes following out-of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) [6–9,15,21–23].

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Supported in part by a grant (HS 04000) from the National Center for Health Services Research.

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