EM Quick Hits Video on Mechanical CPR with Sheldon Cheskes

What is the evidence for mechanical CPR?

  • The original ASPIRE trial on mechanical CPR was stopped early because patients had worse outcomes with mechanical CPR as a result of prolonged interruptions in CPR when placing the device. However, the trial was conducted before the importance of high quality uninterrupted CPR was recognized.
  • Recent studies show that if the device is place on the patient quickly high quality CPR is achievable, but do not show any survival benefit when compared to high quality manual CPR.

“The Cheskes 7”: When to consider Mechanical CPR

  1. Few resources and people (eg. rural settings)
  2. Long transport times
  3. Manual CPR quality is not assessed (this often means CPR quality is poor)
  4. Emergency department CPR (rarely studied and often shown to be of poor quality)
  5. The PCI lab
  6. Refractory Ventricular Fibrillation going to ECMO
  7. Heads up CPR (having the patient’s head elevated in CPR may improve perfusion to the heart and brain but is not possible with manual CPR)

The Podcast: EM Quick Hits 8 – Lemierre’s Disease, Clonidine Toxicity, Routine Coag Panel, Anticoagulation Reversal, Mechanical CPR

In each EM Quick Hits Video, our team hand picks an EM Quick Hits podcast segment and curates a video to enhance you multimodal learning.

Our EM Quick Hits Video team is: Lara Murphy and Yajur Iyengar and Jonathan Whittall