Abstract

AGUILERA-CAMPOS, Andrea; ASENSIO-LAFUENTE, Enrique  and  FRAGA-SASTRIAS, Juan Manuel. Analysis of the inclussion of police personnel on the out of hospital cardiac arrest emergency response. Salud pública Méx [online]. 2012, vol.54, n.1, pp.60-67. ISSN 0036-3634.

OBJETIVE: Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OCHA) is a public health problem in which survival depends on community initial response among others. This study tries to analyze what's the proportional cost of enhancing such response by involving the police corps in it. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We analyzed retrospectively an OCHA registry started on June 2009. We contrasted a model with limited number of ambulances and police based first response. RESULTS: Mortality was 100%, response times high and 10.8% of the victims were receiving cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) by bystanders. In 63.7% of the events the police arrived before the ambulance, in 1.5% of these cases the police provided CPR. The cost for each saved life was of 5.8-60 million Mexican pesos per life with only ambulance model vs 0.5-5.5 million Mexican pesos on a police first response model with 12 ambulances. CONCLUSIONS: In Queretaro interventions can be performed taking advantage of the response capacity of the existing police focused on diminishing mortality from OCHA at a lesser cost than delegating this function only to ambulances.

Keywords : heart arrest; firemen and policemen in disasters; electric countershock; Mexico.

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