Check for danger first. Traffic, fire, electricity, water, a hostile person. A rescuer who becomes the second casualty has halved the help available.
Check for a response. Shout and shake the shoulders gently. No response: shout for help.
Open the airway. Head tilt, chin lift.
Look, listen and feel for no more than ten seconds. Chest movement, breath sounds, air on your cheek.
Occasional noisy gasps are not breathing. Agonal gasping is common in the first minutes after a cardiac arrest, it looks like an attempt to breathe, and mistaking it for breathing is the single most common reason bystander resuscitation is not started. If you are not sure, treat it as not breathing.
Call. 112 in the European Union and the EEA; the local emergency number elsewhere. Put the phone on speaker, on the floor, and keep your hands free. The dispatcher will talk you through compressions — let them.
Chest compressions.
- Centre of the chest, heel of one hand, other hand on top.
- 100 to 120 a minute, to a depth of 5 to 6 cm in an adult.
- Let the chest come all the way back up between compressions. Incomplete recoil is as harmful as a shallow compression.
- Do not stop. Every interruption drops the pressure that is keeping blood moving, and it takes several compressions to build it back.
Rescue breaths — 30 compressions to 2 breaths — if you are trained and willing. If you are not, compressions alone are far better than nothing and are what the dispatcher will ask for.
Keep going until the emergency services take over, the person clearly wakes up and breathes normally, or you are physically unable to continue. Swap with another person every two minutes if you can: compressions get shallower long before the person doing them notices.
Source. European Resuscitation Council, Guidelines 2021, Basic Life Support, https://cprguidelines.eu/guidelines-2021 ; the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation, https://www.ilcor.org/
What this is not. Reading, not certification. Resuscitation is assessed by watching somebody do it on a manikin. Book a course.