ABC
We’d all like to assume if we went into cardiac arrest in the street, someone would come to our aid.
But it turns out gender can affect your chances of being resuscitated — and women are at a disadvantage.
Key points:
- Research shows some people fear they will be accused of sexual harassment if they give a woman CPR
- Yet all Australian states and territories have Good Samaritan laws which protect bystanders acting in good faith
- Some CPR trainers are tackling this issue by using female-presenting mannequins in classes
Recent research presented at the European Emergency Medicine Congress found bystanders were less likely to give cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to women than men, particularly if they went into cardiac arrest in public.
A pair of Canadian researchers, Sylvie Cossette at the Montreal Heart Institute and Alexis Cournoyer at the Montreal Sacred Heart Hospital, analysed more than 39,300 patients who had out-of-hospital cardiac arrests between 2005 and 2015.
They found only 54 per cent were given CPR by a bystander.
The researchers then focused on the roughly 9,000 people from the total group who went into cardiac arrest in a public place (as opposed to a private residence) and found bystanders gave CPR to more men (68 per cent) than women (61 per cent).
But when the researchers looked at cardiac arrests in private settings, older women were more likely to receive CPR than older men.
Cardiologist and director of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute Jason Kovacic said research showing that women who go into cardiac arrest outside the home are less likely to be given CPR has been growing over the past decade.
A 2018 study in the US of more than 19,000 patients who had out-of-hospital cardiac arrests found 45 per cent of men received bystander CPR compared to 39 per cent of women — a result echoed by a 2019 study from the Netherlands (73.9 per cent versus 69.2 per cent).
Professor Kovacic said the barriers stopping people from giving CPR to women need to be urgently addressed.
“People who have had a cardiac arrest are in grave trouble and are likely going to die if nothing is done,” he said.
“Some 20,000 to 30,000 people [in Australia] have out-of-hospital cardiac arrests each year so this is a massive problem.”
Clinical and interventional cardiologist Fiona Foo said this gender disparity in CPR rates was one of several reasons why women with heart disease have poorer outcomes compared to men.
She said it was noteworthy that even paramedics were more likely to give CPR to a man than a woman (40 per cent versus 36 per cent), according to 2019 data from NSW.
“The public and doctors still don’t feel that women have heart disease or are going to have a cardiac arrest,” she said.
“There’s still this thought that women don’t die of heart disease when it is actually the second-leading cause of death in women in Australia after dementia.”
Why aren’t women given CPR?
Research suggests there’s three main reasons behind this reluctance:
- fear of inappropriate touching
- fear of causing injury because women are “physically weak or fragile”
- poor awareness of a woman being in cardiac arrest.
A 2019 study of 550 people found 40 per cent of males feared being accused of sexual harassment if they exposed or touched a woman’s chest.
