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Hospitals Are Dangerous Places … for Heart Attacks ?

by Liz on January 8th, 2008

I saw the heading ‘Heart Attack in Casino Safer Than One in Hospital ‘ and thought that makes no sense. Hospitals have standard protocol for treating heart attacks and cardiac arrests. Protocol that medical staff are well trained in. Mock arrests and frequent education ensure that they are kept up-to-date with emergency resuscitation procedures. But for all that, it turns out that hospitals are not the safest place to have a heart attack or cardiac arrest.

According to an article recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine about a third of patients in hospital who suffer cardiac arrest don’t get prompt defibrillation (shocking the heart) within the recommended two minutes after a collapse. And without these immediate shocks, the patient is more likely to die or end up disabled and/or brain damaged.

In fact, it’s been determined that the odds of suffering a heart attack or cardiac arrest actually increase if you were somewhere like a casino or an airport.

Why ?

The reasoning behind this is amazingly simple. If you were to collapse in a crowded place like a casino or airport, you would receive immediate attention from the people around you. And these places also have immediate access to Automatic External Defibrillators (AED) machines designed to be used by first responders and first aiders. You hook the person up to the machine and the machine talks to you and tells you what to do. It’s brilliant technology.

Whereas, in a hospital, unless you are hooked up to cardiac monitoring equipment and/or being constantly observed, your collapse might not be noticed immediately. And this is even more of a possibility in smaller hospitals, after hours, and on the weekends. As a result, defibrillation is often delayed. Furthermore, many hospitals don’t have AED’s and the only person able to shock the patient is the doctor, who might still be running from the other side of the hospital.

Here’s hoping that if this study does nothing else, it will encourage hospitals to review their cardiac resuscitation procedures and consider purchasing AED’s so that nurses, who are ones that usually find the collapsed patient, are able to administer life-saving shocks without having to wait for the doctor.

Meanwhile, it might be a good ideas to sharpen up your CPR skills ’cause you never know when you might need them.

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POSTED IN: First Aid, Health, Healthcare, Medicine, Misc., Prevention