|
HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Would a Heart Attack Victim Survive Outside Hospital? If one gets a heart attack, chance that he or she will survive is practically zero if emergency treatment does not applied within 10 minutes. In fact, every minute’s delay in receiving help reduces the chance of survival by 10 percent, according to an emergency medicine specialist. In Singapore, about 900 people die of heart attacks each year, and more than 500 are dead before they reach the hospital. The survival rate is only 2.7 percent, as help does not arrive fast enough for heart attack victims. In general, paramedics will take between 8.6 minutes and 14 minutes from the time they are alerted for help until they reach the patient’s place. A study by a senior consultant at the Singapore General Hospital (SGH), who actually followed ambulance teams on calls, has revealed that such delay is sometimes caused by people’s bad behaviors. For example, some vehicles refuse to give way to an ambulance that has its light and sirens wailing, while some lift passengers are unwilling to give up their space for paramedics and their bulky equipment like a stretcher.
The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) receives 100 emergency calls a month for heart attacks. Unfortunately, only 1 in 37 people, who suffer a heart attack at home or in the community, would survive. Although the survival rate here is comparable to New York’s, it is very different from the 50 percent survival rate for heart attack victims in Cook County in Seattle, casinos in Las Vegas or Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Such big difference is due to the large number of people in these areas who are trained in resuscitation and easy availability of defibrillators. An earlier study has also shown that victims living in high-rise flats generally have a longer wait. The paramedics will need about 1 minute 45 seconds longer to get to them. As such, families of heart attack victims could actually help by holding the lift ready for paramedics and directing them to the correct house. Remember, every minute saved could make a very big difference. A team of emergency doctors from several public hospitals studying over 2000 out-of-hospital heart attacks have advised that families of patients with heart disease to learn cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) because 6 in 10 heart attacks happen at home, and suggested installing more defibrillators in public areas such as shopping centers. Published in the Singapore Medical Journal, the study also found that more people are getting heart attack between 8am and 7pm. Such pattern has already been seen in the West but this is the very first time it is shown to occur here. Knowing such patterns would assist emergency doctors and the SCDF better plan and allocate resource, including making available more vehicles and paramedics at such time slot. Meanwhile, the team is currently studying if there is any geographical area in Singapore that has more cases of heart attack possibly because of more elderly people living there. If so, it might worthwhile to station ambulances in those places to improve response times.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Copyright
2007-2012 © HowToPreventHeartDisease.com . All Rights Reserved. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
