Welcome to the Emergency Medicine Cases Podcasts.

I'm your host, Dr. Anton Hellman, bringing you Canada's brightest minds in emergency medicine

live from the Emergency Medicine Update Conference in Toronto.

On this special episode, Beyond ACLS, taking cardiac arrest care to the next level, we have

Pocus Guru, master educator, assistant professor at the University of Toronto, the calmest,

nicest guy you'll ever meet the one and only Dr. Jordan Chenkin.

And today, we're going to show you how we can do better than standard ACLS.

Yeah, you see, ACLS was originally designed to give us a common language

and help us avoid paralysis in a crisis situation.

Yeah, I mean, it's a sensible goal, but on the other hand, with each year that passes,

it seems like ACLS has become more and more simplified, and that

appeals to sort of a broader scope of rescuers, those that rarely run a code, but cardiac

arrest physiology really ain't that simple.

You know, managing these patients requires a little bit more finesse.

Exactly.

Those of us who work in an emergency department and manage codes on a regular basis should really be expected to have a more sophisticated approach, don't you think?

Absolutely.

So to help you up your cardiac arrest care game, we're going to present a case that shows these three events the ACLS way,

and then a more finessed way. We're going to talk about VF that just won't convert after a few shocks. We're going to assess for return of spontaneous circulation by doing a pulse check.

And then we're going to talk about the arrested, pulseless electrical activity patient.

All right. So, here's the case.

A 50-year-old woman is out for a run and collapses to the ground.

...