Hands for Life Project

Stamford Hospital has been offering emergency heart attack intervention as a service to the community for more than three years with many great successes. We have also instituted a therapeutic hypothermia program for patients who remain comatose after cardiac arrest. Recently, we had two dramatic cases of young patients who would not have otherwise survived yet both walked out of the hospital. When looking into these successes we identified a few key components. One obvious component is Stamford Hospital's close association with Stamford EMS. Another was not so obvious. Both patients received early Bystander CPR before EMS arrived. Without this support, the patients would not have been able to be resuscitated and would never have made it alive to Stamford Hospital's Emergency Room.

Currently the City of Stamford's rate of Bystander CPR is at approximately 30% of cardiac arrests. The national average is 27%. Seattle and King County Washington set the national high water mark with approximately 55-60% of all arrests and 80% of witnessed arrests receive this life sustaining therapy. This translates directly to improved patient outcomes. A series of studies in 2006 showed a survival rate of 45% in Seattle, WA and Rochester, MN compared with a less than 5% survival rate in Detroit, Chicago and New York. Stamford's Survival rates are between 6 and 7% about average nationally. There are many factors involved here but the first link in the chain is a population that identifies the symptoms of a heart attack, early activation of 911 and early resuscitation if necessary.

I believe that we can easily improve upon our performance in Bystander CPR. CPR training for the lay population-including Hands-Only CPR without mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in many situations- has been streamlined and can now be done in a very short period of time (approximately 20 minutes). In order to help achieve this goal we started Hands For Life: Stamford to get out the message. This a joint project with help from Stamford Hospital, the City of Stamford, the American Red Cross and the American Heart Association. We would like to contact people in as many venues as possible. Our plan is to work with local civic groups and businesses to arrange talks on heart disease, recognizing the signs and symptoms of a heart attack, activating 911 and performing CPR. This is to be followed by a series of workshops at those institutions with Hands-Only CPR training. We hope to have follow-up contact with the participants for further training and elicit their help in contacting and training others in the community.

We would love for your involvement in our program. In addition to training in hands-only CPR we are looking for contacts that you may have with local businesses, civic groups and religious institutions who may want to be involved as well. I have been amazed at the excitement this project has already created. I look forward to working with you directly on this project. Given what I have learned about the tightness of our community, I know that we can reach our goal of increasing CPR rates from 30% to 50% in one year. Please feel free to forward this link to anyone you think might be interested in getting involved. There are contact numbers below to let them become part of what I hope will be a life saving change for Stamford.

To register for classes, please click here and select "Hands for Life" from the dropdown.