Jesus Phone brings the DEAD back to LIFE
Get me an iPhone and 20cc of adrenaline, stat!
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When doctors are attempting to save the life of someone who has suffered a heart attack, they do a better job if they use a free iPhone app developed to brief them through procedures and drug dosages, according to a recent trial.
"Every year approximately 30,000 people in the UK have an unexpected cardiac arrest in hospital and, despite significant advances in resuscitation research, survival rates for adults suffering a cardiac arrest remain poor," says Dr Daniel Low, consultant anaesthetist.
Low and his colleagues found that one of the main problems in cardiac arrest situations – where doctors are under severe time pressure and may be outside their personal specialist comfort zone – is the matter of getting drug dosages right. The amount of adrenaline or other drugs to be given varies according to the situation and the patient, and the numbers vary from time to time based on the latest research – much as the recommended techniques for ordinary cardiopulmonary resuscitation by first-aiders have altered bewilderingly over the years.
To deal with this, Low and his colleagues developed an iPhone app dubbed iResus©, which is distributed by the UK Resuscitation Council for free. The app is very fast to use and is always updated with the latest information (provided the iPhone running it has a data connection).
To find out whether the app was effective, Low and other medics involved in the project carried out a trial. They recruited 31 doctors at the Royal United Hospital in Bath, all of whom had had advanced resuscitation/life-support training within the last four years. The docs were split into two groups: roughly one-third of them already owned iPhones and these fanboi and fangirl medics were split equally between the two groups.
The two groups were then put through a simulated cardiac arrest emergency and their performance was graded on a scale known as the CASTest scoring system. The trial group were armed with iPhones running iResus, and the control group had no smartphones.
The Jesus-phone-packing docs found it significantly easier to bring their simulated patients back to life after their hearts had stopped, scoring an average of 84.5 (out of a possible 100) on the CASTest as against the primitive smartphoneless medics who scored just 72.
Low regards this as a firm endorsement of his app's lifesaving properties.
"More than 60,000 free copies of the iResus© application have already been downloaded," he enthuses, "and a healthcare professional recently told us that they had used it when they were involved in an out-of-hospital paediatric emergency. Being able to refer to paediatric drug doses they were unfamiliar with helped them to save a child's life."
The UK Resuscitation Council says:
We would like to see this guidance in the pockets of all doctors and healthcare professionals. Currently it is in the top 10 medical apps.
There's no Android or Windows Phone version, however.
You can read all about the hospital trial here courtesy of the journal Anaesthesia. ®
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COMMENTS
iPhail.
Piss-poor doctors by the sound of it, losing MIs like that.
My wife is a casualty doctor (although not an Emergeny Medicine specialist, as it seems to indicate these doctors were) and I can assure you, an iPhone app would be more hindrance than help.
She has to KNOW the various drugs and doses, and I'm pretty sure her success rate is better than either of those groups. Which includes an MI that would have killed if the guy hadn't been in a casualty bed already.
Marketing for apple at it's worst. Such an app should be on any smart phone, available to GPs and others suitably qualified.
Mobile phones
"the type of person that would go round photographing patients is not the type of person to be hampered by being asked to turn their phone off"
Yes. We have ways and means of dealing with anti-social folk like this. Trust me on this.
I do not know what it is like where you have been but mobile phones to be honest are more of a disturbance to the peace and quiet than anything else but the photography issue is of course also an area of concern.
From my point of view, basically it's like this.
If you're reasonable about your phone use and have been reasonably courteous and civil, I would usually turn a blind eye unless you're really close to certain areas, for the aforementioned reasons.
Usually these folk actually ask for permission to use their phone, and usually they get a yes from me dependent on the situation. If I need to move them, I usually tell them where they can go and stand and all is well.
If you're some nasty rude prick, however, you will be asked to turn it off.
I usually do not ask a second time.
Moral of the story: You come into a hospital, you don't disrespect the place or the people there.
Oh, and by the way, I think most doctors are usually more pissed off than you are, about having to carry pagers. This is beside the point, but old style pagers as you know, only receive, they do not transmit. There are new VOIP devices however, that are necessarily wifi devices, of course.
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