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Social networks as a tool to promote the week of cardiac arrest awareness “Viva!” in Italy

2013; Elsevier BV; Volume: 84; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.resuscitation.2013.03.033

1873-1570

Erga Cerchiari, Niccolò Grieco, Tommaso Pellis, Giuseppe Ristagno, Andrea Scapigliati, Federico Semeraro,

Emergency and Acute Care Studies

Major restraints likely to account for currently poor outcome of cardiac arrest (CA) include low rate of bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and limited or delayed access to electrical defibrillation. Since rapid institution of bystander CPR has shown to greatly improve survival from witnessed cardiac arrest,1Nolan J. Soar J. Eikeland H. The chain of survival.Resuscitation. 2006; 71: 270-271Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (203) Google Scholar attempts to enhance lay people awareness about the importance of early CPR and defibrillation may lead to an improvement in CA outcome. Therefore, public awareness campaigns are rapidly growing. On June 14th, 2012, a declaration from the European Parliament called for a week of cardiac arrest awareness, to be held throughout Europe.2Declaration of the European Parliament of 14 June 2012 on establishing a European cardiac arrest awareness week at: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+TA+P7-TA-2012-0266+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN&language=EN.Google Scholar Responding to the call, the Italian Resuscitation Council (IRC) has set up the “Viva!” week3Viva! Campaign Official website at: http://www.viva2013.it.Google Scholar (“Viva” in Italian means both “alive” and “long life for”), planned for October 14–20th, 2013. IRC has also established a scientific board, including different specialists in the field of CPR, in order to produce educational tools targeting the lay population. The concurrent involvement of the nationwide network of CPR trainers together with institutions, scientific societies and associations representing patients and relatives was organized, aiming at achieving a 360-degree promotion of the campaign. A recent review has provided evidence in support of new and alternative methods for CPR training.4Yeung J. Okamoto D. Soar J. Perkins G.D. AED training and its impact on skill acquisition, retention and performance – a systematic review of alternative training methods.Resuscitation. 2011; 82 ([Epub 2011 March 31]): 657-664Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (75) Google Scholar For this reason, on February 13th, 2013 the “Viva!” Board decided to launch the cardiac arrest awareness campaign in Italy through a viral web campaign that took advantage of all the most popular social network tools available on Internet, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. More specifically, the awareness process started by spreading a poster with the ‘8 rules’ on how to perform a compression only CPR in order to promote a call to action in the general population. The poster named “Life in your hands. How to deal with cardiac arrest” was released on Facebook on March 21st, 2013 at 23.49. Facebook is a social networking service launched in February 2004, owned and operated by Facebook, Inc.5Facebook Official Website at: http://www.facebook.com.Google Scholar As of September 2012, Facebook has over one billion active users more than half of whom access this network with a mobile device. Surprisingly, there was an incredible growth of unique users that visualized the poster on Facebook over the initial 72 h from its post. Indeed, from March 21st, 2013 at 22.49 to March 24th, 2013 at 22.49, we observed an explosive increase in the number of visualization up to 30.000 in less than 24 h from the release, and overall to 57.088, at the end of this report. In conclusion, social networks like Facebook are extremely promising for resuscitation councils and educator communities as a tool for sparking interest and spreading important messages to the lay population (Fig. 1). Members of the Viva! and IRC Scientific Committee.