The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and the American Heart Association (AHA) will host Strive to Revive, the AHA Regional Resuscitation Conference, on Feb. 21. The conference is the first of its kind in the Southeast and will bring leading in-hospital and out-of-hospital resuscitation experts together to examine current state-of-the-art resuscitation practices, particularly hospital resuscitation.
“There is a new emphasis on resuscitation training and techniques in American medicine,” said Henry Wang, M.D., vice chair for research in the UAB Department of Emergency Medicine. “We’re learning so much about new ideas, from therapeutic hypothermia following cardiac arrest to best EMS practices during stroke.”
Conference organizers hope to attract 150 medical professionals from across the Southeast who practice in emergency and critical care medicine departments, intensive care units or medical emergency teams.
The conference will be held at the Hilton Birmingham Perimeter Park Hotel at Highway 280 and Interstate 459. Speakers include Wang; Anthony Edwards, M.D., vice chair for education at UAB’s Department of Emergency Medicine; and Sherrie Squyres, M.D., medical director of Huntsville Emergency Medical Systems, Inc. Survivors who benefited from advanced resuscitation techniques will be on hand to share their stories.
Wang said the conference will help attendees learn how to use new hospital cardiac arrest data; it will also teach best practices and serve as a resuscitation show and tell from leading hospitals in the field.
The conference will cost $30, with 6.25 CME/CEU credits available. Register online at www.learn.heart.org.
Since 2006, UAB has been part of the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium — a federally funded research effort in 10 U.S. and Canadian cities aimed, in part, at improving cardiac arrest survival rates. During that time, survival rates for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest have doubled in the Birmingham area.