Three Minutes From the Defibrillator - Sports Medicine clinical simulation case. A 44-year-old male referee collapses mid-whistle at a youth soccer...
Age: 44 • Gender: Male • Setting: Emergency Triage
Clinical Presentation & History
A 44-year-old male referee collapses mid-whistle at a youth soccer tournament, clutching his chest before falling pulseless to the turf. Bystander CPR is delayed by confusion and crowd interference. The user arrives to direct the on-field resuscitation while an AED is reportedly locked inside the equipment shed, the venue has no formal EAP, and the ambulance ETA is nine minutes.
Acute Resuscitation Milestones & Priorities
Clinical phases and key interventions encountered in this emergency module:
Scene Command: Recognizing Cardiac Arrest and Activating the EAP
Quality CPR and AED Rhythm Analysis
Post-Shock Hemodynamics, Epinephrine Timing, and Etiology Workup
EAP Audit, AED Chain of Care, and Handoff to Receiving Center
High-Yield Clinical Pearls
Sudden cardiac arrest is the leading cause of death in young athletes; early defibrillation within 3 minutes yields survival rates of 50-74%.
The 4 Ps of athletic emergency response: Plan (written EAP), People (trained responders), Provision (accessible AED), Practice (quarterly rehearsal).
Coarse VF on the monitor in a collapsed athlete is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy until proven otherwise; the Maron registry reports HCM in ~36% of athletic SCA cases.
Real-time CPR coaching — 'push harder, full recoil, faster' — improves compression fraction and depth; compression fraction >80% is the AHA quality target.
Public AED placement, written EAP, and responder training are independently associated with survival in athletic SCA per the 2013 Drezner cohort study.
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