Therepeutic Hypothermia post Cardiac Arrest

[EnviroMed]

Hi Everyone,

I am a paramedic from South Africa, working for a small private service striving to be the best in South Africa.

Noone in South Africa currently does therapeutic Hypothermia post Cardiac Arrest. Not even any of our hospitals. We are looking at trying to get up to a level where we can establish Post cardiac arrest induced hypothermia. Is there a device out there that we can use to induce hypothermia prehospital, and then hand over the patient in hospital with the machine and leave it there until the patient is back to normal temperature and then we can collect the machine.

Does anyone out there know of such a device? Or is anyone out there doing prehospital therapeutic hypothermia?

Let me know.

thanks
Shaun

There is a device called the "arctic sun"

http://www.medivance.com/

it uses an external cooling apparatus to cool the body temperature to specific temperatures, it even has a dial that you can use to program cooling/ active rewarming. Amazing stuff. Saved many many lives. God Bless.

 

[TatuICU]

There is a device called the "arctic sun"

http://www.medivance.com/

it uses an external cooling apparatus to cool the body temperature to specific temperatures, it even has a dial that you can use to program cooling/ active rewarming. Amazing stuff. Saved many many lives. God Bless.

We use the Arctic Sun in our unit. Works well, manually adjustable for bringing pts back to normothermia, pretty cool. Had some success but generally outlying ERs that transfer to us get things started too late to be effective.

 

[Another German]

In Europe you will find sometimes a cooling system called RhinoChill.

The RhinoChill System uses a non-invasive nasal catheter that sprays a rapidly evaporating coolant liquid into the nasal cavity, a large cavity that is a heat exchanger and lies right under the brain.

I´m quite sure, you will find the system easy via google for example. It might be suitable for EMS and hospital.

I have made no experience with this system myself. We cool down the pts down via cold infusions (having a cooler in every ambulance with a constant temperature of 5° Celsius (apporx. 40° Fahrenheit).