Many people are alive today thanks to efforts of ERC but like all advanced applied science we stand on the shoulders of giants.
Back to overviewOver the past century, Europe has been a fertile soil
for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and emergency medical care. It has produced
many of the pioneers of resuscitation science including Vladimir Negovsky,
Peter Safar, and Fritz Ahnefeld who introduced the universal concept of the
Chain of Survival (“die Rettungskette” 1967).
Kouwenhoven, Jude and Knickerbocker had introduced
modern CPR in 1960. By 1966, the techniques were adopted by the first CPR
Conference of the American National Academy of Sciences with the recommendation
that healthcare professions should receive appropriate training. The Red Cross
and the AHA played key roles in the process. The Guidelines for CPR have
developed progressively over the years and the published reports of the CPR
conferences were widely distributed. European scientists from many disciplines
and organizations attended the fourth 1985 CPR and ECC conference in Dallas and
came home with fresh and innovative ideas. In many countries national CPR councils or
working groups were established but the time had come for international
collaboration in this area.
In the 1980s, scientific, political and economic
Europe was developing rapidly with a growing desire for collaboration. In 1986
the late Lars Mogensen, a distinguished cardiologist from Stockholm, initiated
a proposal to create a working group on CPR in the European Society of
Cardiology (ESC) but it was not accepted at their 1988 Congress in Vienna.
After this rejection, a group of enthusiasts met up in the catering area of the
congress. Strengthened by a beer and a hamburger, Douglas Chamberlain, Leo
Bossaert, Lars Mogensen, Hugh Tunstall-Pedoe, Paul Hugenholtz, Stig Holmberg, and
John Camm agreed to set up an interdisciplinary international collaborative European
council on CPR, and chose the name ‘European Resuscitation Council’ (ERC).
An initial meeting of 20 founding members representing
all major European disciplines with an interest in resuscitation medicine took
place in Antwerp on 13 December 1988 (see
PDF below for details) with the support of a grant from the Laerdal Foundation. Douglas
Chamberlain became temporary Chairman and Leo Bossaert temporary Secretary until
official elections could take place. The agreed objectives were ‘To save human
life by improving standards of resuscitation in Europe, and by coordinating the
activities of European organisations with a legitimate interest in
cardiopulmonary resuscitation’, to be achieved by science, guidelines and
implementation.
In August 1989 an Executive Committee elected Peter
Baskett as the first Chairman, with Stig Holmberg vice-chairman, Daniel
Scheidegger as Honorary Treasurer and Leo Bossaert as Honorary Secretary. Peter
Baskett was succeeded in turn by Wolfgang Dick, Pierre Carli, Petter Andreas
Steen, David Zideman, Bernd Boettiger, and Maaret Castren.
Inter-professional collaboration has been paramount:
formal collaboration has been set up with more than 30 National Resuscitation
Councils (NRCs), including some outside Europe.
Collaboration with industrial partners has also been encouraged.
Organisation.
The ERC was created by a group of friends. Many of the successes and
achievements were facilitated by this personal approach and by individual
members that were driven by a common passion and commitment. This intimate structure
could not be maintained as the organisation grew to more than 1000 members, with
major international congresses, course manuals translated into most European
languages, hundreds of annual courses, thousands of certified instructors,
active communication via website and Newsletters. This required a professional
organisation with corporate governance, efficiency and subsidiarity that was in
place by 2011.
Journal.
Resuscitation became the official journal of the ERC in 1991 with Douglas Chamberlain
as the first editor-in-chief (followed by Peter Baskett and Jerry Nolan). It
became a leading journal in this domain.
Congress.
The first Congress of the ERC was in Brighton in 1992. The move to wider
international cooperation had been proposed by the American Heart Association
at a meeting in Dallas in 1991, and a liaison committee that later became known
as ILCOR was established at this Brighton meeting. Subsequent ERC congresses have been held in
Mainz, Seville, Copenhagen, Lyon, Antwerp, Firenze, Budapest, Stavanger, Ghent,
Porto, Vienna, Bilbao, Malta, Köln, Prague and Reykjavik.
Guidelines.
Producing guidelines for the practice of CPR is a core business of the ERC. Science
is now being reviewed globally by ILCOR and their consensus serves as the basis
for production of
ERC guidelines and development of courses at
intervals of approximately 5 years: 1992, 1998, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015. They are accepted
in most of Europe as the standard of care and the reference for clinical
practice.
Courses.
ERC courses reflect the most recent guidelines, with
hands-on training and uniform teaching methods. With the support of NRCs,
manuals are translated into many European languages.
Today, instructors from different European countries need
to meet only briefly before running perfectly coordinated course in BLS, ALS,
PLS or NLS.
Landmark
events. In 2012, a group of ERC members and European Members
of Parliament (MEP) made a written declaration (0011/2012) with recommendations
to increase awareness of Cardiac Arrest in Europe. As a result, a dedicated annual day
to increase European Cardiac Arrest Awareness was set on 16th October, starting in 2013. The title of this is “European Restart
a Heart Day”.
In 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) endorsed a
joint Statement by the ERC, ILCOR, the European Patient Safety Foundation, and
the World Federation of Societies of Anaesthesiologists, promoting training
school children in CPR worldwide. Its title is “Kids Save Lives”.
In
summary, the core business of ERC remains as it was from the
beginning: ‘To preserve life by making high-quality resuscitation available to
all’.
A comprehensive history of the ERC was published by Leo
Bossaert and Douglas Chamberlain in 2013 in Resuscitation.