How to perform CPR on victims with spinal injury ?
Thursday, January 5th, 2012 at
7:15 am
How to perform CPR on someone who has spinal injury(or suspected) if he is lying in a awkward position ?
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The same way you’d perform CPR on a patient without a spinal injury. If possible, you could try to take extra precautions when rolling the patient onto their back (as you say they’re in an awkward position). If it is you an another person, one of you can support the neck and try to roll the patient onto his back with the least amount of extra movement to the back and neck. From there, perform CPR as normal. Possibly have the person who is doing ventilations (if you’re not doing hands only CPR) continue to support the head and neck by keeping it as straight as possible. But if it’s just you, roll the patient as best as you can and then do CPR as normal. Don’t press more lightly with compressions. Still do the recommended depth of at least 2 inches. But when you ventilate, instead of tilting their head back (head tilt, chin lift), try to push their jaw forward in a maneuver called the jaw thrust, which helps to minimize movement to the spine while still opening the airway.
If you’re not trained in CPR or uncertain of how to do a jaw thrust, you can always just simply do hands-only CPR where you just do compressions and do not ventilate.
You have to remember that performing high quality CPR outweighs the risk of potential spinal injury. If you do not perform CPR, the patient WILL die. It’s the same as if you come across a car accident and the patient in the car requires CPR. There is a potential risk of spinal injury if you move the patient, but death is absolutely certain if you do not remove them from the vehicle to perform CPR.