Video: Specialist cardiac arrest team to double lives saved in Glasgow

The 3RU pilot has been running across the city - which has he highest rate of arrests in Scotland - for the past seven months.

It involves a dedicated team of paramedics ‘circling’ Glasgow in vehicles stocked with life-saving drugs and equipment including autopulse vests, which provide automatic CPR while the patient is being taken to hospital.

While the results have not yet been evaluated, project leaders say it is expected to emulate results shown in Edinburgh, where it doubled the number of lives saved.

There are now plans to roll the scheme out to Lanarkshire, another area with high levels of heart disease.

The Glasgow team sees around 30-40 cardiac arrests every month, where the heart stops beating. A heart attack is caused by a blockage in an artery, cutting off blood supply to the heart, and patients can remain conscious.

A third of people who are having a heart attack will go into cardiac arrest.

Steven Short, who helped devise the 3RU scheme for the Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS) said it was showing “very promising” results. It is part of a range of national measures aimed at saving an additional 1000 lives by 2020.

He said: “We piloted some work in Edinburgh where we took a team of paramedics where we gave them so extra training.

“They get preferentially tasked to cardiac arrests. We roughly saw a doubling in survival. We would hope to see massive improvements in Glasgow through all the work we are doing.

“We are excited and hopeful.

“There is a high volume of cardiac arrests in Glasgow, through all the health conditions people suffer from.

“There are direct links between areas of social deprivation and cardiac arrests. You are more likely to suffer from a cardiac arrest but less likely to get bystander CPR.

“In Glasgow, we have a team of four who are based out of Springburn station with plans to extend that with an extra car that will have 24-hour availability.

“We are now planning to roll it out to Lanarkshire and other urban areas.”

Alan Craigie, area manager for Springburn Station, said: “We are hopeful, it’s going to show very promising results.”

The SAS is also focussed on increasing the number of people equipped to perform CPR. There is a national strategy aimed at boosting numbers by 500,000 over the next three years. Figures show a person is two to three times more likely to survive if they receive CPR and around 80% happen in the home. For those who are not trained to perform the 'gold standard' of two breaths to 30 compressions, experts say compression-only CPR is sufficient.

Mr Short said: “When you have a cardiac arrest the most important person is the person standing next to you.

“You rely on them to recognise the problem, phone for help and do bystander CPR.

“It’s a huge part of improving survival.

“We partner with Save a Life for Scotland, along with the British Heart Foundation and other partners, to improve bystander rates.

“We have also made a small but important change to calls. We go straight to, is the patient breathing then say, right we need to get them on the floor and start CPR, rather than asking their name, address.

“It means we can go straight to CPR advice.”

The SAS say paramedics involved in the 3RU scheme require close monitoring and support, since they are likely to experience a high number of traumatic incidents.

Ronnie Hewitson, from Clydebank, who is part of the 3RU team, said: “When you do these jobs, you learn how to process things.

“We aren’t just supporting the patients, we are supporting the family and sometimes that’s more traumatic.

“We are seeing a mother lose her son, a husband losing his wife.

“It’s about trying to detach. There is a perception then that we don’t care but that’s not the case.

“When you get a good result, it’s great.

“There is no typical scenario. It’s a very wide spectrum. It could be drug related, it could be someone suffering from something like Sepsis, it could be a young person with an underlying heart condition.”