By Dennis Agbo

The IVAN Research Institute in partnership with the Association of Nigeria Physicians in America, ANPA, has trained 24 Nigerian doctors and nurses on the steps and dynamics in offering Basic Life Support (BLS) to persons with cardiovascular emergencies.

The doctors and nurses who were drawn from ten states in Nigeria spread across twelve sites in the six geopolitical zones of the country were trained during two days intensive training in Enugu with practical demonstrations on how to resuscitate lives of persons who develop cardiac arrests or heart attacks in emergency situations.

Both partners said that cardiovascular diseases have become commonplace in the world hence the need to sharpen the skills of Nigeria healthcare workers, and indeed the general public, on the practical steps in Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) as responses in emergency situations so as to save lives.

The health workers were practically trained on different methods of how to swiftly place a patient on a flat surface and use their hands on a patient’s chest to pump blood into the heart or use Artificial Manual Breathing Unit- (AMBU) bag; or the Advanced Electrical Device (AED) to resuscitate a patient who just suffered heart attack or cardiac arrest.

“Once you see a collapsed patient, probably shouting for help, you rush to him or her and ensure that the patient is placed on a flat surface before you begin to push or pump the chest. While pumping, the power comes from the shoulder and not from the whole body. First you ask the patient ‘are you okay,’ make sure you don’t get tired of pumping otherwise you may lose the patient. Every second you do the right thing saves life,” one of the trainers, Angela Brown, said.

Compression and positioning of pocket masks on a patient’s nose, particularly in cases of pediatrics, were exhaustively demonstrated while urging the health workers to always be thorough and pay close attention to information from patients so that they could have proper and adequate diagnosis.

On the infant CPR, the Nigerian America-based trainers demonstrated the process as almost the same with adults but with a few differences such as use of two fingers for pressing of the baby while the infants use smaller pocket masks and smaller AMBU bags. Special attention was drawn to the trainees that CPR is only applied on patients when they have low pulse and low breathing.

Assistant Director of IVAN Research Institute, Dr. John Olawepo, said that the training which was a collaboration between IVAN and ANPA was because “we think that because of the high mortality and mobility of cardiovascular events, that this is an opportunity for us to train our doctors and nurses across the country. Present here are a doctor and a nurse from 12 sites across the country. There are two sites in each of the geopolitical zones in ten states of Nigeria. They are 24 in number receiving the training for basic life support.

“This is how we can prevent people who slump and save their lives; give them first aid, give them basic life support until they get to a hospital. We think that it will help to address a lot of sudden deaths that have been in the country. This training is important because cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of sudden and even general deaths across the world. Among the Cardiovascular diseases, hypertension is the commonest disease and that’s why we organized the training.

“This particular training, the BLS, is for emergencies, but it’s always good for every hospital to be prepared. The doctors and nurses here will now understand what tools they need to provide in their hospitals so that they will ready if there are emergencies in their hospitals or in their communities where their hospitals are located, but this particular BLS training is part of a bigger grant that we are working on which is the Community Vital Signs, CVS.

“The hope is that this training that the doctors and nurses have received, when they go to their hospitals, they will train other doctors and nurses in their hospital; the more people that have these skills the better for all of us.”

Prof Nkechi Mbaezue of the Association of Nigeria Physicians in America, ANPA, working in association with ABNM Staffing Limited Abuja, stated that ANPA does other medical missions in Nigeria but that the course was intended for chronic diseases, particularly cardiovascular health.

“Cardiovascular health is one of the leading problems that we have and we have a lot of risk factors such as hypertension, high cholesterol which eventually lead to heart disease and could lead to cardiac arrest. Cardiac arrests happen both out of the hospitals and in the hospital and each second matters. So the whole point of BLS is that every second matters and everybody can be a life saver.

“So, this training is to get everybody in the community, not just in the hospital, to be a life saver. Every second that you can do something for somebody that collapses you are saving the person’s life and that is the goal for this Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, CPR, in the communities as well as in the hospitals because a lot of cardiac arrests happen outside the hospitals.

“Imagine that all bystanders will do something to save a patient’s life; most times when somebody collapses, people panic, they don’t know what to do and they are shouting and pouring water, but imagine if we have everybody who knew the skills of this basic life support and that is what we are doing with this training,” Mbaezue said.