Women’s Health Month: Avive Speaks Up For Our Women and Girls

May is Women’s Health Month, and at Avive, we’d like to speak up for our women and girls.?

We’re excited to share first-of-its-kind AED technology that brings women’s health and wellness to the forefront of cardiac arrest emergency response care. Our AllRescue? Technology offers more ways to help more people, with an emphasis on women and children. Read on to learn how and why we’ve created the first and only AED that depicts a woman’s chest and audio instruction that prompts the user to “Expose the patient’s bare chest, including bra.” #WomensHealthMonth?

Females are less likely to survive Sudden Cardiac Arrest when compared to their male counterparts. Immediate Hands-Only CPR and quick defibrillation with an AED provides a patient in SCA with the best chances of survival, and the gender discrepancy in survival rates largely comes from bystander hesitancy to perform CPR on women. When CPR is denied to a woman because a would-be-rescuer does not know how to approach a woman’s body, she has no chance of surviving cardiac arrest.?

We can’t blame bystanders for their hesitancy to perform CPR on women so long as our awareness deemphasizes female-specific issues and our training efforts only prepare people to perform CPR on men. Research has shown that women are 27% less likely to receive CPR when a SCA occurs in a public place, and this disparity is often rooted in fears of exposing a woman’s breasts in public or “hurting” her by giving compressions. If you’ve ever taken a CPR training class before, ask yourself–what did the mannikin look like? We’d guess that you most likely practiced compressions on a mannequin without breasts.

Allison Dupont, MD, FACC, FSCAI

What we wish more people understood is that the technique required to perform CPR is the same for all adult body types, and as Dr. Sarah Perman puts it, “Providing this lifesaving procedure for women should be normalized, not sexualized.” ??

When it comes to responding to SCA, the worst thing you can do as a bystander is nothing.

In an attempt to quell any hesitation on the part of the rescuer, the Avive Connect AED is the first AED unit to audibly instruct users to, “Expose the patient’s bare chest, including bra” when responding to a cardiac arrest emergency. By defaulting to a woman's chest on our AED's visual instruction graphics, we hope that this will help shift the culture of response when it comes to providing care to female SCA victims.?

We hope you’ll join us on our journey to save lives and deliver more equitable Sudden Cardiac Arrest outcomes to our women and girls across the country.