In Europe, approximately 350,000 patients each year are unsuccessfully resuscitated following sudden cardiac arrest, and they die. This is about 1,000 patients per day. Most of these patients suffered an acute myocardial infarction. What would happen in Europe, if two Jumbo jets crashed here – two every day – without any survivors, and a similar number of deaths resulted? Would we start to invest more effort in this area? Would relevant amounts of money for research, education, and implementation of new and promising strategies be made available? No doubt at all. Why is this different with sudden cardiac arrest and resuscitation?

Sudden cardiac arrest is a major healthcare issue. Besides prevention, cardiopulmonary resuscitation is the final way to combat it. On the European level, the European Resuscitation Council (ERC) is the interdisciplinary organization tackling this important challenge. The ERC – the Network of Resuscitation Councils in Europe – has about 1,250 full and 212,000 guest members located in 28 countries on 3 continents, with 25 languages being spoken. The mission of the ERC – to preserve human life by making high quality resuscitation available to all – can be reached by working hard with the formula of survival:

Survival = research × education × implementation

Education is the critical link between knowledge, scientific progress, and survival of our patients. Scientific knowledge serves no purpose, if education fails.

In addition to the numerous activities in the areas of research and implementation – with new European Guidelines every five years and the next being presented in October 2010 – the ERC offers multiple educational courses including basic (+/- automated external defibrillator, AED), advanced, pediatric, and newborn life support and – together with other European organizations – the European Trauma Course, thus representing and covering the whole spectrum of resuscitation scenarios and skills. To ensure the highest quality of education, instructor courses are offered, and their alumni hold ERC certificates. This important section of ERC activities is administrated via our online Course Management System (CMS), enabling us to manage course administration in its entirety, to produce certificates, and to continuously ensure and control the quality of the instructors and courses. In 2008, a total of 5,362 courses were held, 45,322 certificates were issued, and the ERC was supported by and supported 6,733 ERC instructors and 496 ERC course directors.

The last three previous ERC biennial scientific congresses in Budapest, Stavanger, and Ghent were visited on average by 1,500 to 2,000 participants. We are looking forward to an even greater number of visitors at the Guidelines Conference Resuscitation 2010 in Porto, Portugal, in December 2010. Following a series of intermediate symposia in Lyon 1999 (Education), Krakow 2001 (Ethics and Law), and Marseille 2003 (AED implementation), the ERC has decided to have – in the years between its biennial scientific congresses – smaller symposia related to specific topics.

Resuscitation 2009 is the first ERC symposium in this series, it will focus on education, and it is already a great success with regard to the general interest generated, the number of participants, and the interest from industry. The program of Resuscitation 2009 is far reaching. It will help us answer many important questions related to the link to survival: Which possibilities do we offer with respect to educational purposes to teach people about the art of resuscitation? Which tools are available to spread this essential knowledge among all members of our society, from school children to truck drivers and to senior citizens? How can we improve the quality of education and, thus, survival? And: How can we teach Europe?

How can we improve the quality of education and, thus, survival?

The ERC and one of its youngest members, the German Resuscitation Council (GRC), have taken the opportunity to combine this international with a national GRC meeting and also to focus on some of the most important topics related to education in this issue of „Notfall & Rettungsmedizin”. We are proud of and grateful to the authors who present important topics like:

  • “ILCOR hot topics: advanced life support (ALS)”,

  • “European trauma course (ETC)”,

  • “Starting at school – an approach to improve resuscitation outcomes?”,

  • “Feedback to feedforward: a positive approach to improving candidate success”,

  • “Simulation in medicine”,

  • “E-learning in resuscitation: removing the instructor, the manikin, or both?” and

  • “Research in medical education”,

  • which are presented in this issue of the Journal, together with all accepted abstracts of the scientific symposium.

We cordially invite you to join the ERC scientific symposium on „Education” and the GRC meeting in Cologne and to partake in our efforts to improve and further develop highly important issues related to education and resuscitation. For those of you unable to visit the Metropolis on the Rhine river, please visit our homepages (http://www.erc.edu and http://www.grc-org.de) for further information. We are convinced that you will also find very interesting stimuli for your education purposes in this special issue of „Notfall & Rettungsmedizin”. Please relax and enjoy reading this issue; likewise, we hope that you continue to work on survival for our future. We look forward to meeting you.

Yous sincerely,

Bernd W. Böttiger, M.D., D.E.A.A.

Chairman, European Resuscitation Council (ERC)

Burkhardt Dirks, Ph.D, M.D.

Chairman, German Resuscitation Council (GRC)