Cardiac Arrest

A cardiac arrest occurs when a human’s heart stop pumping blood throughout the body. It can be detected immediately when the human body shows abnormal or no signs of breathing at all, no pulse, is unconscious and unresponsive.

What you need to do

If a person has a cardiac arrest, one must act very quickly as they can only survive if they were given a correct treatment immediately.

Call 999 straightaway and quickly ask for medical help. People who are trained in CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) must perform this as soon as possible, even before medical help arrives. If untrained ask any bystander who can. A CPR has 2 main aspects, chest compression and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Those who are not trained to perform a CPR can perform chest compressions until trained medical help arrives which may still improve chances of survival. A CPR will temporarily keep blood that carries oxygen to circulate through the body until the emergency help arrives or until a defibrillator device is available.

Ask any bystanders if they have a defibrillator or ask someone to get it for you. A defibrillator is available in many places such as pharmacies, schools, hotels, gymnasiums and other common public areas such as train stations, shopping centres, airports etc. Due to their easy to use design and the access, these are generally also known as Public Access Defibrillators (PADs).

Defibrillator

A Defibrillator or a AED (automated external defibrillator) is a medical device that helps restarts the heart by placing the connected defibrillator pads or electrodes on the patient's chest and giving it an electric shock. An adult patient must be applied adult defibrillator pads and a child patient must be applied child defibrillator pads unless there is a button on the defibrillator itself to select adult or child patient mode as appropriate and the pads being applied are for use by both adults as well as children. An AED comes with verbal and/or visual prompts that anyone can easily follow until help arrives. Through the connected pads, the defibrillator analyses the patient's heart rhythm and if required gives a electric shock to the patient or provides the rescuer with instructions on further action required.

Having a defibrillator can save someone’s life. A trusted healthcare medical supplier such as Foursquare Healthcare provides a massive range of quality medical products at affordable prices. For more information just visit our website or get in touch with us on 0207 101 4177.