Hear from Ann Doll, Executive Director of the Resuscitation Academy Foundation in Seattle, WA, as she discusses how to improve survival from cardiac arrest. Watch the video or view the transcript below.

Can you describe high-performance CPR and why it’s so important?

Ann: High-performance CPR is so important because it literally suspends the dying process. When we train and perform on perfect rate, depth and recoil, it keeps the brain and the heart and the rest of the body alive until further care can happen.

It is essential that we train on those fundamentals – low dose, high frequency – as much as we can.

Can you describe what it means to have a culture of excellence – and why this is something organizations should strive for? 

Ann: When an organization has a culture of excellence, to me, it's really talking about teamwork: assembling a team of providers who come to work every day always looking to improve their level of care.

When we take that teamwork and we wrap it in quality improvement continuously, leadership and training, we really provide the best package for a team to create the mental model that believes that their system will save lives.

If you could give one piece of advice to a community that wants to start implementing the 10 Steps for Improving Survival from Cardiac Arrest, what would it be?

Ann: If I could give a community one piece of advice when improving their cardiac arrest survival rates, it would just be to start small. When you're starting out, just choose one project that will help to start to build on a culture of improvement.

It could be just working on improving the rate of CPR compressions, their chest compression fraction. Or making sure there's full recoil on every evolution of CPR.

Any of those small steps will help start to build on success. It could be that they just start by improving on one shift or an improvement project for one month.