From the Publishers Desk
DEPARTMENTS
Citizens’ Help Gives Seattle Best Life Support System
It is interesting to note that “some 34 percent of all Medic One (Seattle) cardiac responses are summoned by a bystander who has started CPR before the unit arrives.”
According to Chief Frank Hanson, this citizen participation (Medic II) in Seattle’s emergency medical service was a natural spinoff of the department’s Medic One project. Medic II was started by a paramedic who wanted to teach CPR to the families of Seattle’s fire fighters. Once started, it kept growing until today 185,000 Seattle/King County citizens are trained in this most important function for life preservation.
Medic II has proven to be an outstanding success since it started, as a report involving 316 attempted resuscitations by emergency crews proves. Of these, 316,109 were preceded by CPR performed by a lay bystander. Immediate resuscitation rates were nearly the same—67 percent for bystander CPR, 61 percent for the others. But the similarity ended there. Two thirds of those whom a layman aided lived. Only a third of the others survived.
As you can read elsewhere in these pages, survival rates for those helped by bystander-administered CPR also fared better. It would seem then that citizens performing CPR on heart victims play a major role in Seattle’s advanced life support concept.
Most of the initial funding for the citizens program came from the city’s largest Rotary Club and it is now a United Way Project. But citizen help went far beyond this. Early on, in the fire department’s attempt to operate an advanced life support system, federal funds ran out, and the city couldn’t come up with the money—leaving the program $100,000 short.
Public subscription provided the solution that eventually brought in $200,000—mainly in $1 and $2 donations. Since then the program has expanded and improved, which shows what a fire department working with its civilian population can do.
