How to Perform a Rescue Breath for CPR

Video Transcript

In this clip we're going to talk about giving the patient rescue breaths. After you've determined that the patient is unresponsive, that the patient is not breathing, it is important to first give a breath. You can either do this by yourself by pinching the nostrils closed and maintaining an adequate seal with your mouth around theirs making sure that no air can escape or enter. You want to give one slow deep breath while maintaining eye contact on the chest. Just enough air to see the chest rise. You want to avoid over inflating the patients chest because one the lungs reach their maximum of oxygen the oxygen can go down into the stomach. What happens is your stomach will then fill up with gas, this can cause the patient to vomit, which is a very common process to happen while giving CPR and rescue breaths, also once the stomach kind of inflates with oxygen it will actually prevent the lungs from expanding to their full potential. So again, just to kind of demonstrate this, make sure you pinch the nostrils, make a seal with your mouth, and give a breath. By doing that method it's hard to actually see the chest though. They sell commercial devices, such as this here, where it's just a mask and it has air in it. This allows you to have for a good seal, and it has a one way valve here. You could just breath through here but what's nice about the once way valve is that if the patient did vomit you not actually getting anything in your mouth and also when the patient expires, you're not going to get any of his air in you. It's important to maintain the head tilt chin position that opens that airway that we talked about. To hold the mask you want to do what they call the AOK. You want to put your fingers around this and you want to use your three fingers here to lift up on the chin while still applying the pressure. This will look like this. After you give one breath, you see adequate chest rise, you want to give a second ventilation. If for some reason you don't get a ventilation the first time you want to reposition the head, to see if maybe the airway was the problem and give a breath. You want to make sure you can two full complete breaths in before you checks a pulse and begin CPR.

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