The American Heart Association (AHA) believes an additional 50,000 lives per year could be saved if all hospitals in the United States adopted its Resuscitation Quality Improvement (RQI) program.
According to a 2014 study, patient survival after in-hospital cardiac arrest can vary by as much as 42 percent between randomly selected facilities. This shows that poor-quality cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) exists even among professionals, and should be seen as a “preventable harm,” according to the AHA.
The RQI method is a low-dose, high-frequency program—differing from more intensive training models which only take place every year or two. Approximately 300 hospitals in the U.S. have adopted the RQI program since it was launched in 2015.
“Increasing the number of healthcare providers using the Resuscitation Quality Improvement program will save more lives,” John Meiners, the AHA’s chief of mission-aligned businesses, said in a press release. “Approximately 10 minutes of CPR skills practice each quarter helps to eliminate ‘skills decay’ and offer ‘skills mastery,’ resulting in high-quality CPR performance.”
Daniel joined TriMed’s Chicago editorial team in 2017 as a Cardiovascular Business writer. He previously worked as a writer for daily newspapers in North Dakota and Indiana.