Are you able to verify that each of your hospital staff is ready to deliver high-quality CPR on any given day. Find out how RQI is changing the standard of care in resuscitation.
On an April day in 2013, Michael Lovelace, a nurse at the UAB Medical Center began feeling the symptoms of a heart attack while at work. As a healthcare provider, he knew this was a serious situation and took himself to the Emergency Department. Shortly after that, he went into full cardiac arrest. It took 18 minutes of High-Quality CPR and four shocks with a defibrillator for Lovelace’s heart to return to a normal rhythm.
Imagine a similar scenario in your hospital. Studies show that timely delivery of High-Quality CPR, done the right way plays the biggest role in survival. Are you able to verify that each of your hospital staff is ready to deliver high-quality CPR on any given day, to a patient like Michael, and to every patient?
Under the current system, even skilled, trained and committed providers are sometimes unable to give high-quality CPR to each patient, each time. Much of the problem lies with the traditional CPR training approach, where staff members take their resuscitation course every two years and receive a card upon completion. The AHA’s Resuscitation Education Science 2018 Scientific Statement makes it clear that these two-year courses do not consistently achieve resuscitation competence. Studies have found that CPR skills can decay within months of the training, leading to poor clinical care and negative survival outcomes for cardiac arrest patients. The course completion card represents knowledge acquired on that day of training, but not actual sustained competence. In order to reduce variation in hospital performance and improve the quality of patient care, something has to change.
But here’s the good news: a new paradigm for resuscitation practices is already in place and working successfully at leading health care organizations. This new standard emphasizes mastery learning through low-dose, high frequency quality improvement sessions that measure and verify competence in high-quality CPR. By practicing CPR more often in shorter sessions, skills stay sharp, knowledge decay is prevented and more lives are potentially saved.
The American Heart Association and Laerdal Medical have joined together to pioneer a program called RQI 2020, with a mission of saving 50,000 more lives each year. The program provides mobile simulation stations that offer realistic patient scenarios that allow health care providers to refresh their skills in 10 minutes. More than 400 U.S. hospitals have implemented the program to date.
Unlike programs that are offered offsite in classrooms, RQI 2020 is provided in the health care workplace. This setup benefits both the individual and the organization, increasing convenience and competence and limiting the time away from the bedside.
In Lovelace’s case, not only was his hospital participating in the RQI program, but he was an RQI Coordinator and had helped to implement the program for hundreds of staff, including those performing CPR on him that day.
“The nurse who was there had been trained with the Resuscitation Quality Improvement device in the Emergency Department” said Lovelace. “And I have to believe that the skills he produced on that day helped save my life by doing adequate and proper CPR."
RQI also offers simulation-based mastery learning based on the needs and skills of the individual user. For instance, there are separate programs for clinical personnel, pediatric health care providers and hospital support staff. When you want to know if a staff member has demonstrated competence in High-Quality CPR, you can find out with a few clicks of your mouse. The data and analytics make it easy for department leaders to track CPR performance down to the individual level. The program is also much easier to administer than traditional training regimens, saving time and effort.
Operational efficiencies and cost savings – combined with the proven effectiveness of shorter, more frequent sessions – are big reasons why so many health care organizations are adopting the RQI program.
Currently, in-hospital survival-to-discharge rates average less than 26%, which is simply far too small a number. Lives are being lost because competence is lacking. We know we can do better. With RQI verified competence, we can dramatically improve the delivery of high-quality CPR across the nation and save more lives.
