
Area: Trustwide
Each year over 30 000 people’s hearts suddenly stop beating in communities around the UK (a condition known as out-of-hospital cardiac arrest). Giving drugs, such as adrenaline, is very effective at restarting the heart. However, for many people drugs are given too late to save them. This partly explains why less than one in ten people survive an out of hospital cardiac arrest.
Current guidelines advise paramedics to inject drugs into a vein. It can take several critical minutes to put a drip into a vein, ready to give drugs. Another way to give drugs is to put a small needle into an arm or leg bone. This allows drugs to be given directly into the rich blood supply found in the bone marrow.
None of the existing research was good enough to help paramedics know which of these is the best way to give drug treatments. The aim of the trial was to find out if giving drugs through a vein or into the bone is the most effective way to treat someone when their heart suddenly stops working and whether it makes a difference to how well people recover after cardiac arrest.
The study showed that the use of an intraosseous-first vascular access strategy did not result in higher 30-day survival than an intravenous-first strategy. For more information on the results, please click here.