Part 8. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation education: 2015 Korean Guidelines for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation

Abstract

Cardiac arrest is a major social and public healthcare issue. According to the 2015 statistics of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 45.1 persons per 100,000 population had a cardiac arrest and the rate of resuscitation for cardiac arrest is 4.8%, which is low in comparison with the economic scale of the country [1]. Moreover, the mean prevalence of patients discharged with cerebral performance categories 1 or 2, which indicate good neurological prognosis for patients who had cardiac arrest, was only 2.3% [2]. This is also lower than the 9.6% of the overall survival rate to hospital discharge reported in a CARES (Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival) research that covered the entire United States of America from 2005 to 2010 and the 8.9% reported for Osaka, Japan, from 2007 to 2009 [3,4]. In addition, resuscitation rates differ by five- to six-fold at the maximum between regions, thus requiring multilateral considerations. In order to successfully apply the newly introduced 2015 cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) guidelines to the society, a well-planned integrated application strategy is required, along with an educational strategy as a core factor.