Good morning, troops. It’s Thursday, June 7.
When it comes to cardiac-arrest survival, what goes down must come up. The more efficiently, the better.
That’s part of the philosophy behind new lifesaving equipment the Peoria Fire Department will be carrying on its vehicles, effective Friday.
The ResQCPR System appears simple in design and in use. It’s a hand-held pumping device, with a suction cup, that medical personnel use to help perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Practitioners push down on the chest, as legions have been taught to do in CPR. But the device provides lift that increases cardiac blood flow. Traditional CPR can impede that process, according to Matt Jackson, the medical director of emergency services for OSF HealthCare.
“If you’re not recoiling off the chest, you’re just simply not getting blood back to the heart,” Jackson said Thursday morning. “This is literally a plunger. It’s pulling the chest up, maximizing that recoil, maximizing the blood flow back to the heart.”