EMS professionals are a critical link in successful resuscitation from cardiac arrest. Approximately 400,000 Americans experience an out-of hospital cardiac arrest every year and only 10 percent survive. However there has never been a CPR course tailored to EMS professionals until now.

The American Heart Association released, for the first time, a new CPR course geared specifically toward BLS prehospital providers.

Basic Life Support for Prehospital Providers BLS PHP, released in October 2014, combines flexibility and customization to meet department and agency needs. The course is based on the 2010 American Heart Association guidelines for CPR and ECC and will be updated when the 2015 guidelines are released in November.

Why the new course?

The American Heart Association heard from EMS providers that the previous BLS Health Care Provider course was missing essential and realistic CPR training. The new BLS for Prehospital Providers course focuses on first responders and uses realistic EMS team approaches to respond to cardiac arrests in the field.

The new course format

The BLS for Prehospital Providers course consists of both online and classroom components, and the new format stresses the importance of transition of care from BLS to ALS EMS providers.

Online

The online portion is narrated and presents the cognitive information. Students must complete all the objectives in order to complete the online portion of the course, and cannot skip ahead.

The online course focuses on three core scenarios:

• Cardiac arrest in a car
• A child drowning in a family pool
• Cardiac arrest in a home bathroom

Students must pass the online exam to move on to the classroom portion.

Classroom

Students then attend the in-classroom portion, led by an American Heart Association BLS Instructor. The classroom portion features instructor-led discussions, debriefing, coaching and support for hands-on skills. The classroom is blended with skills tests from the current health care provider course, along with discussions and a six-person team resuscitation.

The course focuses on a high-performance team approach, moving from two rescuers, to six suggested roles for responders, depending on personnel available. Teams with less than six may take on multiple roles.

Key roles include a compressor, a team member to handle compressions, a team member to handle the airway, another team member to defibrillate/AED, a team leader to delegate roles and make decisions and lastly a team member to administer an IV/IO/medication. The team approach is similar to an in-hospital resuscitation.

Course materials

All materials exist in an online format. EMS agencies can purchase multiple quantities of online keys to access materials for their personnel, and schedule the classroom sessions with their in-house American Heart Association BLS CPR Instructor.

The American Heart Association’s BLS for Prehospital Provider is fun and interactive, and incorporates EMTs, medics, firefighters and police with real life scenarios.

Source:  EMS1 Danielle Cortes DeVito