The Henry Bloom Noble Healthcare Trust has provided a grant of £10,000 to enable the Air Ambulance team at Noble’s Hospital to purchase an Easy Pulse Compact automatic CPR device for use on their fixed wing aircraft.
This device is small enough to fit into an overnight bag. It is lightweight and battery operated and it can provide a patient with consistent CPR chest compressions throughout the flight to Liverpool.
The Air Ambulance services transfers patients with serious medical conditions to one of the major centres in the northwest of England where they can receive the ‘gold standard’ of specialist care.
Around half of those who are sent to major centres across are cardiac patients. Someone for example who has cardiac disease and needs to have a stent fitted can be transferred from Noble’s Hospital to the cardiac centre at Aintree, door to door, within 120 minutes. These patients will already have had all the necessary pre-surgery examinations done at Noble’s and the relevant information will have been sent to Aintree so everything is ready for them when they arrive on the day of their planned procedure.
A stent can be inserted almost immediately and, in some cases, the patient will be ready to be transferred back to Noble’s later that day.
One problem with these transfers has been the patients who are deemed to be ‘high risk’, who might suffer a cardiac arrest mid-flight. Space is critical in the aircraft and there is limited headroom to allow manual cardiac massage to be carried out effectively. It is also physically very hard for one person to continue to keep it up throughout the whole duration of the flight.
The Coastguard helicopter already has a compact automated cardiac compression machine. When the Air Ambulance team had a training exercise recently on the helicopter and saw this being used they realised that it would be ideal for them also to have one on board their fixed wing aircraft.
They approached the Henry Bloom Noble Healthcare Trust for a grant to purchase one.
Dr Malcolm Clague, a Trustee and former surgeon, assesses all the grant applications. He said: ‘‘The Trustees recognised the importance of an automatic compact CPR device in enhancing the care given by the highly skilled team working for the Air Ambulance Service when transferring patients with ‘sick’ hearts for immediate treatment at the specialised Cardiac Centre in Liverpool. If a cardiac arrest should occur during transfer the equipment can be easily used and maintain cardiac output throughout the rest of the journey. The Trustees applaud the work of the Team and are very pleased to provide the funding of the device’
The Air Ambulance service’s medial lead, Dr Kate Teare, thanked the Trust for purchasing the device and said: ‘Automated chest compression devices undoubtedly do better chest compressions than people do. Having this piece of equipment means we can now offer that gold standard of care to more of our patients, even those who are high risk.’
