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Sudden cardiac death remains a lethal and largely unsolved problem, claiming the lives of 300,000 Americans each year – that is more than the mortality from lung cancer, breast cancer and AIDS combined! Why, when we have made such remarkable progress as a profession, why when we have witnessed the mortality from heart disease decline progressively for the past twenty years, why is it that if someone collapses from sudden cardiac death his/her chance of survival in this country is only around 5%?? The simple fact remains that once effective blood flow to vital organs ceases, the chance of survival declines approximately 10% every minute.

Therefore, the ability to save life is directly correlated to the speed with which we can respond to an episode of sudden cardiac death. Restoration of blood flow to vital organs spells the difference between life and death. It is exactly to this critical field of endeavor that Dr. Kathleen Schrank has devoted her career. Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Emergency Medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Dr. Schrank also serves as EMS Medical Director for the City of Miami and for the Key Biscayne Fire Rescue. She served as the Chief of Emergency Medicine at Jackson Memorial Hospital for a decade and has been active in EMS activities, both academically and organizationally on the local, state and national levels.
 
Miami has a long tradition of leadership in the field of cardiac arrest. The first cases of successful resuscitation from cardiac arrest were reported by a Miami cardiac surgeon some fifty years ago. The first prehospital emergency care that moved cardiac arrest care out of the hospital and into the field where it needs to be began in with City of Miami Fire Rescue (MFR) in the 1960’s. Dr. Shrank is carrying forth this tradition of leadership by strengthening and binding all of the vital links in the chain of survival. Under her leadership, MFR was in the national EMS forefront again with early recognition of acute myocardial infarctions (a major cause of cardiac arrest), equipping EMS vehicles with 12 lead ECGs and teaching paramedics to interpret them (1989) and establishing a dedicated system of hospitals for their rapid care (1995). She has been extremely proactive in the education of early responders and has been tireless in her education efforts at every level—she works within the community to coordinate advanced life support training so vital to achieving an informed and responsive populace; she is actively involved in the training program for medical personnel at the EMS level; and she is an award-winning educator of nurses, medical students and physicians. She has taught at national and international conferences designed to educate the profession and the populace regarding the need to respond quickly and effectively to sudden cardiac death. With a similar focus on acute Stroke care, she worked with UM faculty to teach EMS to recognize strokes and developed a system to transport Miami Stroke victims to specialized Stroke Centers in 1999
 
Dr Schrank has initiated innovative EMS programs to begin induced hypothermia (which has been demonstrated to improve survival in unconscious survivors of cardiac arrest) in the field, as well as educating and supporting the area hospitals in developing their own programs. Moreover, she has organized EMS response teams to bring patients specifically to those hospitals which offer such programs. Equally innovative and important, Dr. Shrank has tied Miami into a national data network which analyzes the outcomes of response to sudden cardiac death—a critical element in identifying strengths and weaknesses within the system, identifying opportunities for improvement, and monitoring the outcomes of efforts to make those improvements.
 
It has been extremely clear that if we are going to achieve the same level of success in the area of sudden cardiac death that we have attained in other areas of cardiovascular disease, we are going to need an informed public and a trained medical community that can respond quickly and effectively. Florida Heart Research Institute salutes the leadership of Dr. Kathleen Schrank, who is turning vision into reality.