Single rescuer adult basic life support: An advisory statement from the Basic Life Support Working Group of the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR)

Abstract

This document presents the consensus view of the Basic Life Support (BLS) Working Group of the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR), which represents the world’s major resuscitation organizations (including the American Heart Association [AHA], the Australian Resuscitation Council, the European Resuscitation Council [ERC], the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, and the Resuscitation Councils of Southern Africa). These advisory statements have evolved during 10 meetings of ILCOR from 1991 to the present. The scientific basis for the treatment of cardiac arrest has an active international literature.1 The purpose of creating these advisory statements is to take full advantage of international perspective and experience in the basic management of cardiac arrest. It is hoped that the “Sequence of Action” can be used as a template by individual national resuscitation organizations. This template should not, however, be considered a rigid standard. It is intended primarily to remove the many minor international differences in BLS education that have developed over the last 30 years, often without any basis in science. For example, if the current BLS guidelines of the ERC and the AHA are compared, most of the differences exist without any particular rationale and are based simply on quirks of historical practice. It is hoped that by removing these, BLS training can become as uniform as possible throughout the world. The process for the development of the advisory statements involved 1. Identification of major and minor differences between existing BLS guidelines.2 3 Minor differences mostly involved the use of words rather than any real differences of opinion about scientific content. They were resolved by arriving at a consensus. 2. Presentation of formal position papers on areas of major difference with an emphasis on available scientific evidence. The group attempted to reach consensus on items of controversy, but sometimes the …