Re. ventilation during CPR, the main issue is that it is really hard to do well in the real world. I’m a trained cardiology nurse, worked semiintensive cardiology wards for years, and have probably done more CPR than most.
I have done successful 10 minute sessions of manual ventilation (around the 10-minute mark fatigue in the hands begins impacting my performance) on people with morphine overdoses, so while I’m very far from an expert, I know I can successfully ventilate.
But my real world performance is probably worse than 20% of ventilations given during CPR being effective. And that’s mostly with patients in a bed, working as a team. It only takes a few seconds to dial it in, but a few seconds is all you have before you need compressions again.
Being on my own, outdoors on the ground, jumping from compressions to ventilation, I’d be proud if I got 20% success. However, since in that scenario I’d probably be doing CPR for way more than the couple of minutes I can maintain quality compressions, taking that tiny break every 30 compressions would likely be worth it even if the ventilation sucked. (In any case, follow relevant guidelines, they’re made by smarter people than me).
/tangent
About the FAK bags here, very cool. I find that I’m always looking for a work area when doing even banal first aid. Somewhere dry and clean(ish) I can put things I’m using. Countless are the times I’ve had to dig around for tweezers, tape rolls etc that are hiding in a the folds of a sleeping bag or whatever.
Did you consider having a piece of DCF integrated with the bag to use as a “table”, do you have some other solution or is this perhaps more a “me” problem than a general problem?
