General practitioners should be trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation

BMJ 1995;310:736 (18 March)

Letters

General practitioners should be trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation

EDITOR,--Anthony Avery and Mike Pringle's recommendations regardingemergency care in general practice are useful, but we cannotvisualise every general practitioner carrying a defibrillator,as well as all the other items mentioned, while doing his orher home visits.¹

As anaesthetists, we are constantly appalled at the lack ofbasic resuscitation skills of medical and nursing staff (seniorand junior). Management of the airway is something in whicheveryone seems to fail horribly. If these findings are extendedinto general practice the management would be even worse asgeneral practitioners see few collapsed patients. We believethat the Royal College of General Practitioners should alterthe training programmes for general practice to include at leastthree months in anaesthetics. This could perhaps be incorporatedwith three months in acute trauma (orthopaedics). As Avery andPringle mentioned, regular updates are extremely important inmaintaining skills.