We are very pleased to continue our support for GoodSAM; an innovative and powerful app allowing healthcare professionals and laypersons trained in CPR to respond to out-of-hospital emergency situations.
Resuscitation Council UK’s 2015 Guidelines place an increased emphasis on the importance of starting CPR as quickly as possible when someone suffers a cardiac arrest; for every minute’s delay, the chances of survival decrease rapidly. The organisation’s strategic plan, setting out the direction and priorities until 2020 has two key drivers:
- Optimisation: Ensuring that everything we do is done as well as possible, reaching as many people as possible.
- Development: Proactively developing our offer in areas where we can have the biggest impact in terms of saving as many lives as possible.
GoodSAM which stands for Good Smartphone Activated Medics, uses mobile technology to address the inevitable delay while the emergency services respond, by simply taking advantage of the skills of those people in the vicinity who can start CPR and use an AED if appropriate. This technical platform thus works towards improving outcomes by:
- building the resuscitation community by fostering good working relations amongst all organisations and individuals involved in resuscitation
- encouraging greater participation of all members of society in learning and applying the skills of resuscitation
- improving the outcome of those suffering a cardiac arrest outside of a healthcare environment in accordance with the latest RCUK guidelines
- facilitating/encouraging the use of AEDs by members of the public.
Mark Wilson, Consultant in Neurological Surgery and Prehospital Care Specialist and co-developer of the app, points out that considerable care has been taken to ensure that any individual who registers with GoodSAM is appropriately trained, whether a healthcare professional or layperson.
The app shows the location of over 40,000 AEDs and encourages people to inform them of the locations of more fixed defibrillators. Operating internationally, GoodSAM incorporates the world's most advanced emergency alerting and dispatching platform with a community of responders.
