Emergency Medicine

Adult Medical Resuscitation

•  Prehospital care of a cardiac arrest victim
• Basic the support 
• Advanced life support
• Impending cardiac arrest

Prehospital Care

Most sudden cardiac events occur in the community.The elapsed time that a patient remains in cardiac arrest is critical in determining the ultimate outcome of resuscitation.The earlier the resuscitative efforts are started, the better the chance for survival. Timely assessment and inital stablization of the patient should be the primary goal of the casualty medical officer.Most salvageable patients have ventricular tachycardia (VT) or ventricular fibrillation (VF) as their initial rhytm. The probability of defibrillating these rhytms back to a viable, perfusing rhythm declines rapidly over time. Keeping these factors in mind,the AHA (American Heart Association) has advanced the concept of the chain of survival. This approach to prehospital care has four links, listed in the table below.Due to the lack of resources, the concept of emergency squad has not developed in our country,But these protocols will help you in assessing and stabilizing the patient until consultation is possible.This chapter concerns with your approach towards such patients, not the theoretical aspect of emergency medicine.It presents a step by step guide for your thought process in assessing and stabilizing critical cases.Once the patient is stable, the role of emergency clinicians is over and the patient can be shifted to thw ward, depending on the state of affairs.