Heart Attacks, or Sudden Cardiac Arrest (Sca),

¶ … Heart attacks, or sudden cardiac arrest (SCA), affect more than 300,000 Americans each year and are considered the leading cause of death in the United States. Once a person experiences an SCA event, the single most important thing that will determine if a person survives is the time takes from SCA to defibrillation. In fact, the survival rate of a person suffering an SCA can drop "7% to 10% per minute with every minute defibrillation is delayed." (Drezner, 2009, p.518) Automated external defibrillators (AEDs) have become a common means of surviving an out of hospital SCA, increasing survival rates to as much as 74% when defibrillation occurs within the first 3 to 5 minutes. Because SCA also accounts for nearly half of all deaths involving young athletes, many high schools are investing in AEDs and instigating AED programs to educate the staff and teachers in its proper use. And it is not only students that benefit from an emergency action plans for SCA, but spectators, coaches, officials, staff, and other non-students. While many schools are employing AEDs, little was known about their effectiveness in real-life situations until Jonathan Drezner, and his associates, studied the effects of emergency response planning for SCA with AEDs in high schools across the United States and published their findings in an article entitled "Effectiveness of Emergency Response Planning for Sudden Cardiac Arrest in United States High Schools With Automated External Defibrillators."

This study consisted of a comprehensive survey about emergency planning and any incidents of SCA that had occurred in the last six months and was completed by a representative of the school . More than 1700 individual schools with an onsite AED program responded to the questionnaire, and consisted of schools across all 50 states in rural, suburban, and urban areas. The study discovered that 83% of those who had an AED actually had a corresponding emergency action plan (EAP), but only 40% of schools practice or review their EAP annually. When it came to real-life SCAs, just 36 of the schools reported an incident of SCA with the victims including students as well as non-students. "Thirty-three of the 36 schools (92%) with an incident of SCA had an established EAP," but only half had practiced annually. (Drezner, 2009, p.519) The AED was used to deploy a shock in 30 of the 36 cases, and, 23 of the 36 cases survived to be discharged from the hospital. This study then concluded that a "high survival rate for both student athletes and older non-students with SCA was reported in high schools with onsite AED programs" (Drezner, 2009, p.522) In other words, since roughly 4% of American high schools will experience an SCA event, all high schools could benefit from providing, not only an AED, but also an AED program that is practiced at least once a year.