I’m posting about this again. It is incredibly frustrating to me that some 25 years after I brought the problem of delayed in-hospital defibrillation to the attention of the AHA, nothing effective has been done to address it. Back then I guess I thought (naively, as it turned out) that the remedy to this problem (a rather obvious one, for those who care to look) would be found by a collaborative effort. That was not to be.
A few AHA ECC committee members--the same ones I had contacted about the issue--took it and ran with it, without any credit to me and in a direction I thought was misguided: promoting AEDs for in-hospital use. I believe that approach has rather definitively been shown to have failed (see Chan study cited above and others). Does this mean that that nothing can be done about the problem, or even that it does not exist? No, no, no.
I am apparently a persona non grata with the ECC people. This is partly because I wrote something in the mid-90s that a then-powerful ECC official disagreed with--to put it mildly. Went ballistic is more like it. He notified me later in a letter that he was spreading the word about me, and recommended that I should pursue other interests. My continued expressions of skepticism about AEDs in hospitals, conflicting with the AHA’s promotion of them, is another factor.
I have not succeeded in pursuing “other interests.” This is simply too important an issue to die on the vine. There can be no doubt that quicker defibrillation for in-hospital cardiac arrests would improve survival significantly. I believe I have some good ideas to address the problem. Is anyone, anywhere, interested in working on it? See:
Open-access article in Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation, and Emergency Medicine:
http://www.sjtrem/com/content/18/1/42
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