McLaren Central Michigan, part of McLaren Health Care and the leading health care provider to Isabella County and surrounding areas, has received a grant to aid in the purchase of potentially lifesaving automated CPR equipment. Housed and used in the emergency department, the LUCAS device provides consistent and durable chest compressions for patients in cardiac arrest.
In providing care, chest compressions are a basic technique of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, CPR, a measure to restore blood flow. Keeping blood flowing during cardiac arrest increases the likelihood that more advanced medical intervention will be successful once it can be administered.
“In emergency situations rising to the level of requiring chest compressions, our clinical team will use all available resources to achieve the best possible outcome for the patient,” said Tim Barnes, RN, BSN, CEN, McLaren Central Michigan trauma and stroke program coordinator. “With the addition of the LUCAS device, making an additional clinician available, that’s one more person that can address the patient’s underlying condition and start to provide timely, vital care.”
Purchase of the LUCAS device was aided by a grant from the Michigan System of Care, a statewide coordinated system to ensure patients in an emergency situation receive the timely care they require.
When manually performing CPR, clinicians can become fatigued over time, and the quality of their chest compressions may become compromised. Even when other clinicians step in to relieve their colleague, CPR may have to be administered for an extended period of time.
In applying the LUCAS device, cardiac arrest patients are provided steady and consistent chest compressions for the duration in which they’re needed. This also allows caregivers to focus on other tasks associated with the patient’s care, expediting a complete diagnosis in order to treat their condition.
When compared to manual compressions, automated chest compression devices have demonstrated a 60 percent increase in blood flow to the brain, with the LUCAS device operating at 102 compressions per minute. In emergency situations, when seconds count, the device can be applied to patients in an average of seven seconds, during which manual compressions can still be performed.
Learn more about the capabilities of the McLaren Central Michigan emergency department at mclaren.org/centralER.
About McLaren Central Michigan
McLaren Central Michigan is a 118-bed acute care hospital located in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. It offers a full range of health and wellness services including primary care, general surgery, orthopedic surgery, emergency medicine and cancer services. McLaren Central Michigan is recognized as an accessible and dependable source of quality medical care for residents of Mount Pleasant, Isabella County and central Michigan. In addition to its medical staff of over 50 active physicians, it is affiliated with more than 150 other quality providers. The hospital is one of the region’s largest employers, with approximately 550 employees and another 100 volunteers. McLaren Central Michigan received the Governor’s Award of Excellence in 2017 and 2019 and is named as one of the Top 100 Rural & Community Hospitals in the United States by the Chartis Center for Rural Health. It is the only hospital in the central Michigan area to receive a Safety “A” grade in the Hospital Safety report in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
About McLaren Health Care
McLaren Health Care, headquartered in Grand Blanc, Michigan, is a $6.6 billion, fully integrated health care delivery system committed to quality, evidence-based patient care and cost efficiency. The McLaren system includes 13 hospitals in Michigan, ambulatory surgery centers, imaging centers, a 490-member employed primary and specialty care physician network, commercial and Medicaid HMOs covering more than 732,838 lives in Michigan and Indiana, home health, infusion and hospice providers, pharmacy services, a clinical laboratory network and a wholly owned medical malpractice insurance company. McLaren operates Michigan’s largest network of cancer centers and providers, anchored by the Karmanos Cancer Institute, one of only 53 National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer centers in the U.S. McLaren has 28,000 full-, part-time and contracted employees and more than 113,000 network providers throughout Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. Learn more at mclaren.org.