The Power Of 3

The Power Of 3

31 July 2018

In every dental diary, there will be time blocked out for the same training year in year out – CPR and Medical Emergencies. Our training took place last week – we block off an afternoon each year for in-house training, giving us a bit of a team building opportunity as well as a valuable reminder of how important it is to keep up to scratch with what to do in an emergency.

This year we were put on a timer – we had to go from assessing an unconscious patient to at least one use of the defibrillator within 3 minutes – this gives the patient the best chance of survival. I don’t know how simple that sounds to you, but that immediately got my adrenaline going. In that 3 minutes, the following had to happen:

• Assess for danger
• Check if the patient is responsive – call for help
• Check their airway, check breathing, check circulation
• Second person calls 999 – passes on info and gets ambulance on the way
• Second person gets defibrillator (AED) and emergency drug kit
• CPR starts while second person is sorting the above
• Second person returns, turns on AED, removes clothing, and gets AED pads into position whilst CPR is being performed
• AED analyses patient and responds appropriately

3 minutes is nothing. If you were running 3 minutes late to an appointment, no one would bat an eyelid. In fact, in 3 minutes, you can just about make a cup of tea (a weak tea, granted) – but you can’t do a lot else. We all did really well, best time for our group was 2 minutes 21 seconds, the slowest time was still under the 3-minute mark. I definitely needed at least a 4-minute brew of tea after it – hats off to our emergency services, even the basic training is exhausting.

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