By Rachel Engel
DALLAS — The International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC) has teamed up with RQI Partners, a collaboration between the American Heart Association and Laerdal Medical, in an effort to double the out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival rate by 2025.
The collaboration will provide fire service leaders with up-to-date information on new resuscitation programs, strategies and resources for cardiac arrest.
“The IAFC is pleased to work with RQI Partners to help educate fire service leaders on new resuscitation programs to save more lives,” Fire Chief Gary Ludwig, IAFC president and chairman of the board, said. “The resuscitation quality improvement programs and system assessment that are now available to emergency medical services agencies will help our leaders enhance their teams’ CPR readiness when responding to a cardiac arrest and evaluate the effectiveness of their community’s chain of survival.”
In 2019, the AHA, Laerdal Medical and the Resuscitation Academy Foundation debuted four new resuscitation quality improvement programs for out-of-hospital use in cardiac arrest events, delivered by RQI Partners:
RQI EMS: A blended learning program for EMS providers that promotes mastery of high-quality CPR through short, frequent skill sessions
RQI for Teams: A high-performance CPR quality improvement program developed for individuals who respond to medical emergencies as a team
RQI Telecommunicator (RQI-T): A blended educational and resuscitation quality improvement program that provides continuous, simulation-based mastery learning, practice and analytics to telecommunicators for delivery of high-quality telephone CPR to bystanders
Cardiac Arrest System Assessment: Engages EMS systems on how to improve survival rates from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest through evaluation and measurement of response performance