London's Harefield Hospital is currently treating some inpatients with a new type of “advanced” CPR which involves hooking up patients to an artificial lung machine.
Now the hospital is looking to make the technology accessible to many more people. In a new service, people who suffer a cardiac arrest could be offered E-CPR if they do not respond to traditional CPR.
The service, the first of its kind in the UK, will see patients taken to Harefield Hospital - a specialist heart and lung hospital in Hillingdon - by Thames Valley Air Ambulance. Once there, the patients will be hooked up to an ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) machine.
The ECMO machine is able to pump blood through an artificial lung outside the body when a person's own circulatory system does not function properly.
Doctors hope that patients can be hooked up to the machine within 60 minutes of the cardiac arrest to give people the best chance of survival.
“A cardiac arrest...