Note: Your progress in watching these videos WILL NOT be tracked. These training videos are the same videos you will experience when you take the full ProACLS program. You may begin the training for free at any time to start officially tracking your progress toward your certificate of completion.
Welcome to the ProACLS course. This ACLS (Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support) course was designed specifically for you, the busy healthcare professional.
In this lesson, we'll get into the benefits of choosing ProTrainings for your ACLS education. We'll get into the WHY regarding your chosen field and career path. And at the end of the course, we'll provide you with some advanced cardiovascular life support survival rates.
We designed ProACLS with three core components in mind:
- Ease of use
- Learning efficiency
- Paced at your own speed
ProACLS is available 24/7, whether you're watching a video for the first time, the third time, or coming back after several months for a quick refresher. We're here whenever you need us to be, regardless of your schedule.
We'll get into specific course objectives in a subsequent lesson, but in this course, you can expect to gain all the guidelines and knowledge about current ACLS regulations. Which will ultimately lead to meeting and exceeding the most important course objective:
Providing you with enough real-world knowledge so that when you're a team leader or team member during a cardiac emergency, you can feel as confident as possible to contribute to a positive outcome in that patient's life.
Becoming that kind of confident takes action to achieve – as in, gaining a deeper knowledge than you already possess. Along with honing and refining the necessary skills that many of you already have.
Which leads to an important point: Participants in the ProACLS course are required to have basic knowledge and skills pertaining to basic life support and basic cardiac life support. Which brings up another great point:
Warning: Some things in this course may be familiar to you already, and if they are, that's not always a good thing. We tend to passively listen, read, and learn when things sound familiar. And when this happens, you're much more likely to miss a point or two that one day you may need. Fight this human tendency and you'll get much more from this course.
If you're wondering, what can I expect from the ProACLS course, that's a great question. Here is a list of the knowledge and skills you'll be required to learn in order to successfully complete your course.
- Appropriate basic life support competency
- Electrocardiogram rhythm interpretation for all core ACLS rhythms
- Knowledge of airway management including all appropriate adjuncts
- ACLS drug and pharmacological knowledge
- Practical applications of ACLS rhythms and drugs
- Effective high-performance team skills
Learning these important and valuable skills takes commitment and dedication, and it may require that you watch the videos more than once. It may mean practicing case scenarios several times until they become automatic.
However, what you'll get from that confidence isn't nearly as important as what you can do with that confidence – making a difference when it matters most and possibly saving someone's life.
Throughout the course you can also expect a few Warnings from time to time, like the above warning, and even more Pro Tips, when the information warrants highlighting. And when there's a need for supplemental information, you'll find a section at the end of these written course lessons that go beyond the video components.
One other thing before we begin, keep in mind WHY you've chosen this field. Life is a precious thing. It's something that should be appreciated, savored, and celebrated. As a healthcare provider, you have enormous power to help people in need. To give back to them the one resource that is truly extinguishable – time. Time for everything that matters to them.
Keep the WHY in your mind as you work your way through this course.
A Word About Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support Survival Rates
ACLS providers face an important challenge — functioning as a team to implement and integrate both basic and advanced life support to help save a life.
The 2020 American Heart Association guidelines update for CPR and ECC reviewed evidence that has shown that in both out-of-hospital and in-hospital settings, many cardiac arrest patients do not receive high-quality CPR, and the majority do not survive.
One study of in-hospital cardiac arrest showed that the quality of CPR was inconsistent and did not always meet the AHA guidelines and recommendations. However, over the years, patient outcomes post-cardiac arrest have still improved.
Cardiac Arrest Survival Data
Out-of-Hospital
| Year | Bystander CPR % | Survival % |
| 2012 | 41.0 | 11.4 |
| 2013 | 40.1 | 9.5 |
| 2014 | 40.8 | 10.4 |
| 2015 | 45.9 | 10.6 |
In-Hospital
| Year | Survival % |
| 2012 | 23.1 |
| 2013 | 23.9 |
| 2014 | 22.7 |
| 2015 | 25.5 |
To analyze these findings, a back-to-basics evidence review refocused on the essentials of CPR, the links in the Chain of Survival, and the integration of BLS with ACLS.
Minimizing the interval between stopping chest compressions and delivering a shock improves the chances of shock success and patient survival. Experts believe that high survival rates from both out-of-hospital and in-hospital sudden cardiac death are possible when utilizing strong systems of care.
High survival rates have been associated with several key elements:
- Training of knowledgeable healthcare providers
- Planned and practiced response
- Rapid recognition of sudden cardiac arrest
- Prompt delivery of CPR
- Defibrillation as soon as possible and within 3 to 5 minutes of collapse
- Organized post-cardiac arrest care
When you can implement these elements early, ACLS has the best chance of producing a successful outcome.
