Cardiopulmonary resuscitation is a salvage procedure It is carried out when a person's breathing or heartbeat has ceased, such as in cases of drowning, choking, choking or injury.
The resuscitation mechanism is not the same for adults as for babies, so we are going to talk about how to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation to a baby under one year old.
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation is a combination of mouth-to-nose breathing to provide oxygen to the baby's lungs and heart compressions, which keep the baby's blood circulating. In this way we try to artificially maintain the adequate conditions of the organism until and so that it is restored.
What is a cardiorespiratory arrest?
Before knowing the resuscitation procedure, it is advisable to know what a cardiorespiratory arrest is, to recognize it correctly. Cardiorespiratory arrest (CRP) is an emergency situation caused by interruption of breathing and circulation, potentially reversible, that is, recoverable. It is characterized because the person does not breathe or have a pulse.
In children, the most frequent causes are those that cause respiratory failure. Once it takes place, PCR leads to death or serious sequelae unless appropriate cardiopulmonary resuscitation maneuvers are quickly initiated, which allow emergency oxygenation without technical means.
The basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is what we can perform in first aid, while the advanced CPR is performed by medical services (through techniques of definitive airway isolation, ventilation and oxygenation, electrocardiographic monitoring, administration of drugs to through proper pathways and proper management of arrhythmias).
Both should be carried out following specific protocols based on the accepted international recommendations for the teaching of CPR and, of course, we will focus on basic CPR for infants, what to do as first helpers in the case of a stop of our baby (or a baby who is with us).
Protect, warn and help
The first thing, if an accident has occurred (trauma, fall ...), is to ensure the safety of the rescuer and the victim, so that the situation does not worsen. It is important that we remain calm, make sure that the baby does not breathe or have a pulse and look for a foreign object in his mouth or throat to remove it in case this was the cause of the stop.
In any case, you have to notify the emergency number (112 in Spain) or have someone make this call if the baby does not breathe and / or has no pulse. We remember that the procedure before an accident must be PAS: protect, warn, help.
If we do not notify the medical services immediately, we can be helping without the valuable professional help indefinitely and with the possibility that our results do not produce positive results. A few minutes are a matter of life or death in these cases.
In addition, from the emergency telephone they can help us in certain maneuvers or if we have doubts about how to act in the first moments of help.
To determine that a person is in respiratory arrest or cardiorespiratory arrest, the first action is to check if they respond to stimuli or not. In the case of a baby, to determine whether or not he is unconscious you have to touch him, speak to him loudly, moving him or pinching him to see if there is any kind of response.
After making the previous checks and confirming that there is a cardiorespiratory arrest, and waiting for emergency medical services to arrive, you have to start the resuscitation maneuver as soon as possible, since brain damage or death can occur within minutes if blood flow in a baby stops.
Remember that we can perform a basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation, while medical services can perform an advanced resuscitation.
In this way, with the emergency services advised, we have to position the baby well and we are prepared to start the cardiopulmonary resuscitation maneuver, which we will talk about in a next topic. By opening and unblocking the airway, ventilation with exhaled air and external cardiac massage we can get the baby out of the stop.
And, although we hope to never have to use them, it is always good to know first aid and how to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation of a baby, since our life may depend on our performance.
