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Citizen CPR Foundation Awards Two Resuscitation Legends
SAN DIEGO—The 2021 Sudden Cardiac Arrest Survivor Summit, held at the Town and Country Hotel & Resort December 6–8, 2021, brought a wide array of instructors, researchers and EMS providers together for five days of intense education in the resuscitation efforts underway and under development worldwide.
Summit 2021 started off with a surprise virtual celebrity guest: four-time champion of the Indianapolis 500 and “Dancing with the Stars” season five winner Hélio Castroneves. Castroneves joined Summit 2021 live from Daytona for a Q&A moderated by Ed Racht, MD, chief medical officer of Global Medical Response and the Summit 2021 Program Chair.
The surprise session explored a fitting comparison between cardiac arrest and a racing pit crew. In both instances, seconds count and teams or crews need to work quickly and efficiently to help someone else.
But the highlight of the annual event was the awarding of the prestigious Hans H. Dahll Award to two prominent resuscitation experts—Vinay M. Nadkarni, MD, and Tom Aufderheide, MD. The two were honored for their outstanding work in research that has improved resuscitation efforts worldwide.
About the Award
The late Hans H. Dahll was a founding director of the Citizen CPR Foundation and served on the board of directors from its inception in 1987 until 2000. The mission of the Citizen CPR Foundation is to save lives from sudden cardiac arrest by stimulating effective community, professional and citizen action.
The Citizen CPR Foundation became a reality in large measure because of Hans Dahll. He served as the foundation’s treasurer for eight years. Dahll also provided the stimulus to create the newsletter Currents, which was published as a joint venture between the American Heart Association and CCPRF.
Dahll was always eager to initiate the path to success in a particular area, collaborate with others to achieve that task, and be willing to let others take the credit and enjoy their successes. Dahll remained independent of his prominent corporate position and contributed greatly to CPR and emergency cardiovascular care (ECC) efforts nationally and internationally.
In 1988, the CCPRF established the Hans H. Dahll Award and lecture in honor of his contributions to the foundation. Dahll was the first recipient of the award. Past recipients have all demonstrated years of outstanding service in research, publication, teaching and education, have made landmark contributions to the science of CPR and ECC, developed new and innovative technological breakthroughs, and had a national and international influence on clinical practice.
This award has been presented at every Emergency Cardiovascular Care Update (ECCU) conference since 1990 (see sidebar).
This Year’s Award Recipients
Vinay M. Nadkarni, MD, is an international leader in the development and implementation of critical care and resuscitation science in both resource-rich and resource-poor environments. He is medical director of the Center for Simulation, Advanced Education and Innovation at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Nadkarni holds the institution’s Endowed Chair in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine.
Nadkarni previously served as director of CHOP’s Pediatric Critical Care Medicine fellowship program, the first such program established in the world, and has mentored and trained more than 100 physicians, advanced practice nurses, post-doctorate fellows, and international trainees throughout his career.
The Center for Simulation, Advanced Education and Innovation at CHOP collaborates with scientists, engineers, industry, and human factors specialists to develop state-of-the art simulation techniques and simulators, provides advanced training in highly realistic simulated environments, and offers consultation and training programs at the local, regional, national and international levels.
Nadkarni is an active participant in the most influential international societies and organizations in this field. For more than 20 years, he has volunteered with Operation Smile International to provide craniofacial surgical repair for more than 2,000 children in resource-limited settings.
He serves on the board of directors of the World Federation of Pediatric Intensive and Critical Care Societies, has chaired the American Heart Association’s International Committee, and currently is the chairman of the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (which links the American Heart Association and resuscitation councils of Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America and Africa).
Tom P. Aufderheide, MD, MS, FACEP, FACC, FAHA, is a professor of emergency medicine with tenure and associate chair of research affairs and director of the NIH-funded Resuscitation Research Center in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Aufderheide is a nationally and internationally recognized researcher in emergency cardiac care whose scholarly achievements include numerous state-of-the-art research studies and over 100 peer-reviewed publications, including two papers in the New England Journal of Medicine, that have had a significant effect on the practice of emergency medicine, particularly prehospital identification and treatment of the ischemic patient with the use of prehospital 12-lead electrocardiography and predictive instruments.
He has served as principal and co-principal investigator on many important national studies, including the Public Access Defibrillation (PAD) Trial, which doubled survival rates for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and will provide the objective data on which to base national healthcare policy for the next decade.
Aufderheide is one of a handful of nationally recognized researchers actively engaged and NIH-supported in the complex area of out-of-hospital cardiac resuscitation research that is likely to significantly change national and international education, training, and clinical practice, including the multi-site Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (ROC) that has both cardiac and trauma clinical trial arms. He also is funded by NIH-NINDS for the Neurological Emergencies Treatment Trials (NETT) network, which will promote and conduct clinical trials in neurologic emergencies.
Aufderheide delivered a powerful keynote address that reviewed how far we have come in the area of resuscitation and where he feels we are going. He caused a moment of silence when he started his talk by saying “We cannot save lives with CPR!” He quickly clarified that we now know that CPR and AEDs alone will not get the heart started in many cases because there are predicable blockages that require interventions in the cath lab and with ECMO, which allow cardiac resuscitation teams to remove a blockage after hours of mechanical CPR and ECMO and enable the patient to recover with no neurological deficits.
Aufderheide caught the crowd’s attention when he reviewed the first in-human clinical trial currently in process to quantify the results of administering sodium nitroprusside during CPR. He explained that while epinephrine, because of its vasoconstricting effects, produces blood pressure at the expense of end-organ blood flow, sodium nitroprusside, a vasodilator—when used in conjunction with active compression/decompression (ACD) CPR and an impedance threshold device (ITD)—allows significant increase in blood flow to the heart and brain, with little decrease in blood pressure.
Aufderheide pointed out that in the resuscitative efforts performed to date using this powerful new resuscitation combination in conjunction with ECMO there has been a nearly 100% resuscitation result with significantly improved neurological outcome compared with standard CPR procedures.
EMS World will bring you updates on this clinical trial and other major advances in resuscitation in special reports to be published in 2022.
Resources
- https://www.research.chop.edu/people/vinay-m-nadkarni
- https://www.chop.edu/doctors/nadkarni-vinay-m
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/1r3QhrmDlN5/bibliography/public/
- https://www.mcw.edu/departments/emergency-medicine/people/tom-p-aufderheide-md
- Tom P Aufderheide, MD | Medical College of Wisconsin (mcw.edu)
- Tom P. Aufderheide, MD | Professor | Medical College of Wisconsin (mcw.edu)
A.J. Heightman, MPA, EMT-P, is chief development officer and a senior advisor with the Cambridge Consulting Group, editor emeritus of the Journal of Emergency Medical Services (JEMS), adjunct instructor of clinical research and leadership at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and member of the San Diego Fire Rescue Department Paramedic Academic Advisory Committee.
