As of 1 April 2011 the Care Quality Commission require all providers to be fully compliant with their Guidance about Compliance: Essential standards of quality and safety. In particular, outcome 9 the ‘management of medicines’ and outcome 11 the ‘safety, availability of equipment’

• 9H It is a practitioner’s responsibility to ensure that drugs required for resuscitation or medical emergencies are accessible in tamper evident packaging that allows them to be administered as quickly as possible.
• 11H It is a practitioner’s responsibility to ensure that equipment required for resuscitation or other medical emergencies is available and accessible for use as quickly as possible. Where the service requires it, this equipment is tamper proof.

As you are aware the General Dental Council in ‘Standards for dental professionals emphasise that:

• All dental professionals are responsible for putting patients’ interests first, and acting to protect them.
• All members of staff, not just registered team members, know their role if a patient collapses or there is another kind of medical emergency.
• All members of staff who might be involved in dealing with a medical emergency are trained and prepared to deal with such an emergency at any time, and practise together regularly.

• There is a public expectation that dental practitioners and dental care professionals should be competent in managing common medical emergencies.
• Specific emergency drugs and items of medical emergency equipment should be immediately available in all dental surgery premises. These should be standardised throughout the UK.
• All clinical areas should have immediate access to an automated external defibrillator (AED).
• There should be regular practice and scenario based exercises using simulated emergencies.
• Staff should be updated annually.
• Audit of all medical emergencies should take place.

The British Heart Foundation and the Resuscitation Council (UK) handed in their petition to Downing Street, for life support skills to become a part of the school curriculum and A to E strongly support this move.

Petitions have also been handed in across the rest of the UK. We have a real chance here to build on the excellent groundwork that has already been achieved. Once again, thanks for your help in this important campaign.

In 2010 A to E Training and Solutions ran their first ever Medical Emergency Management Instructors Course overseas in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The course was run in conjunction with Marie Stopes International as was attended by doctors and nurses from all over the world.

The 15 participants are already Medical Emergency Management providers and had been identified by the course faculty to have the strengths to be developed into instructors of the course. The course was run over three days where participants had lectures and demonstrations on various teaching skills and styles including the concept of Skills Teaching, Scenario Teaching, Scenario Assessment and Lecturing.

They were assessed on their practical application of the skills and had the chance to repeat the requirement after feedback from the faculty. The faculty consisted of six A to E Training and Solutions instructors and six members of the Marie Stopes Medical Development Team. The course was held in the 5* Pan Pacific Hotel in Dhaka with a course meal at the Rotary Club of Bangladesh.

Feedback from the course was extremely high and successful candidates looking forward to working with us on future Medical Emergency Management Courses in the future.

Dr Caroline Howard

Work is well underway to launch the first dental emergencies course in London in February. The course specifically created for the dental community to meet the requirements of the guidance will be one day long and provide for 9 hours of VCPD. Course contents cover the full range of medical emergencies and enable practical skill training for dental practitioners. The course uses advanced manikins to make scenarios as realistic as possible for the participants. It is envisaged that the first course will have 18 spaces. For further information and to register your interest contact info@atoetrainingandsolutions.co.uk.

Chris Kurt-Gabel

Dentistry Education Guide is publishing an article concerning medical emergencies in dental practice in their December issue. The article discusses compliance with the recently issued Resuscitation Council (UK) guidance for dental practice. There is also an overview of the dental emergencies course which A to E Training and Solutions Ltd has designed to enable dental practices to become fully compliant with the recommendations. The implementation of the recommendations remains patchy across the country.

Lee Taylor

London Ambulance has recently released the latest survival figures for cardiac arrest in the capital. These statistics cover the period from 1st April 2006 to 31st March 2007 and relate to 9790 out of hospital cardiac arrests that the service attended. Of these 58% of the patients were deemed to be beyond resuscitation. Approximately 1% of cardiac arrests occurred in a GP surgery whilst figures for dental practices were not separated out. Twenty-two patients were defibrillated prior to arrival of the LAS by someone

trained as part of the LAS’s Community Defibrillation Programme. Ten of these patients (45%) survived to hospital discharge. Cardiac arrest survival rate has increased four-fold over the previous seven years (from 4.2% in 1999), and improved by almost 5% in the last year alone.

Two factors known to influence survival are bystander intervention (CPR) and a witnessed collapse. This increase in survival is exciting and demonstrates how effective training programmes and adequate infrastructure to manage cardiac arrest can significantly impact on outcomes.