Global Resuscitation Alliance

Renowned international organizations, emergency medical services and resuscitation leaders achieved consensus on the establishment of a Global Resuscitation Alliance May 28-29th 2016 in Copenhagen at an international Utstein Meeting. The meeting was held in connection to the first European EMS congress EMS2016 and supported by Laerdal Foundation and the Danish foundation TrygFonden. GRA is the result of a targeted effort towards enhanced survival rates that took its beginning in 1990, when experts convened at the first Utstein meeting in Norway to adopt a set of global guidelines for uniform reporting of sudden cardiac arrests. This came to mark the beginning of intensified collaboration efforts. Since then, a set of shared international guidelines concerning the treatment of sudden cardiac arrest has been adopted, and this has led to a significant improvement in the number of survivors.

GRA focuses on collaborating to implement best practices to increase survival from sudden cardiac arrest. At the meeting in 2016 participants committed themselves to the ambitious target of increasing survival rates by 50 percent. In the spring of 2017 a follow up meeting was held in Copenhagen. At the meeting implementation of best practices in the various member countries was discussed. The meeting was a major and decisive step in global efforts to save more lives from sudden cardiac arrest. The Danish foundation TrygFonden and Laerdal Fonden also supported the meeting in 2017.

The foremost mission of GRA is to be advance the dissemination and implementation of best-practice programmes within the field of emergency medical services and thereby to set new standards for emergency medical dispatch centers, ambulance services, and citizens’ involvement in resuscitation. In 2018 a GRA meeting will be held in connection with the third European EMS congress – EMS2018 in Copenhagen April 14-15 2018. The focus will be on developing EMS systems and the ongoing GRA work. The meeting will gather around 40 selected international expects from Emergency Medical Systems with experience from the positive development in survival after Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest and developing EMS systems.

Read more about the Global Resuscitation Alliance