Medical personnel tout new resuscitation method

Scot Goddard was the picture of health, until the picture was exposed as a mirage.

For the physically active 51-year-old Olathe man, conditions such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol were things he never had to fight. Nevertheless, he found himself fighting for his life when he suffered a heart attack one evening last September.

Goddard was relaxing after having just finished his weekly three-game set of volleyball at the Athletic Club of Overland Park when he collapsed.

Two people at the club administered CPR for several minutes until a Med-Act ambulance crew arrived. That intervention, medical people told Goddard, gave him a chance to live. But it was what the paramedics did next that brought him back to life.

Goddard had no pulse and was not breathing. Until, that is, the crew employed a procedure relatively new to emergency workers here called Cardio-cerebral Resuscitation, or CCR. The victim is convinced he is alive because of it.

“My surgeon told me that one in 100 people survive what I went through,” Goddard said. “He said, ‘Your life was saved long before you got to the hospital. All I did was repair the problem.’”

The surgeon, who performed an open heart bypass procedure on Goddard, told him CCR allowed him to beat those long odds.

The method gradually is being employed more and more around the nation, and locally it is producing dramatic results.

Cardio-cerebral Resuscitation is similar to long-established Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, or CPR, except that the new method puts more emphasis on chest compressions than on combining compressions with mouth-to-mouth breathing assistance.

The Overland Park Fire Department reported that its emergency medical crews had 15 percent more patient “saves” in 2008 than were recorded in the previous year.

Buck Heath, the department’s training officer, gives much credit for that improvement to CCR.

“A save is involved if the patient was technically dead when we got there. If that patient eventually walks out of the hospital, we consider that a save,” Heath said.

While Overland Park’s improved save rate might sound impressive, even higher numbers have been documented in communities where the procedure has a longer track record. A report in The Journal of the American Medical Association stated that after CCR was introduced in some communities, survival rates were more than eight times greater for patients suffering cardiac arrest.

The outcomes here have produced some emotional moments for patients and professionals alike.

“We’ve had patients revived and thank us while they’re still being transported in the ambulance,” Heath said.

Johnson County Med-Act ambulance service, with which Overland Park and other county ambulance crews are affiliated, does not keep “save” statistics, but it is seeing impressive results since it implemented the new method about two years ago.

Med-Act Division Chief Jeff Johnson said 60 percent to 65 percent of cardiac patients are resuscitated before they get to the hospital as opposed to 24 percent two years ago.

When traditional CPR is administered, a patient gets a series of 30 chest compressions followed by two breaths, Heath explained. CCR involves three consecutive sets of 200 chest compressions, with each set followed by a defibrillator shock. Once that sequence is done, crews can go to CPR.

CPR still is the revival method of first choice in cases where the heart has stopped from respiratory causes such as drowning and choking. But when the cause is cardiac problems — and emergency officials say that is the case about 80 percent of the time — CCR is proving vastly more effective.

Heath explained that in such cases it is more important to keep the heartbeat going than to pause to breathe air into the lungs. Enough oxygen remains in the blood stream to adequately serve patient needs during the CCR process, he said.

With more and more defibrillators installed in businesses, stores and schools in recent years, there is a much greater chance of their availability than in the past. The Athletic Club has installed a unit since Goddard’s collapse.

Even if a defibrillator is not handy, Heath said, it still is important to apply chest compressions. And if a lay person is not sure whether to do CCR or CPR, Heath said to go with the former.

“Ideally, if you see someone fall down, you do whatever is necessary to help until the ambulance gets there. But if someone doesn’t want to put their mouth on top of a stranger’s mouth, you still can help. If you just can keep the blood flowing with chest compressions, that’s their only chance,” Heath said.

Johnson said that in addition to saving more lives, the method is easier to learn for professionals and lay people alike.

“There are fewer numbers to remember, and it is just much less confusing in general,” Johnson said.

One key number for CCR students is 100. Heath said that is the recommended number of compressions per minute to administer to the patient. To help keep the proper pace during lessons, Heath sometimes plays background music that has 100 beats per minute. The appropriately titled song “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees just happens to have that beat.

Heath said that when local paramedics initially were learning the new procedure some were skeptical about its effectiveness compared to CPR. It did not take long for a change of heart, and heart-saving preferences, to take place, he said.

“When they see the results they have that ‘oh my God’ moment. Then, they become the teachers.”

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