Douglas Chamberlain obituary | Medical research

If you had cardiac arrest before the 1970s, an ambulance could happen quickly, but almost all of its crew could be to transport you to the hospital, where your treatment would start – if you survive the trip. Cardiologist Douglas Chamberlain, who died at the age of 94, realized that to start resuscitation in the vital window of five minutes after the heart stopped beating, the ambulance crew needed the tools and skills to do it themselves.

Chamberlain’s initiative has laid the foundations of the national and international paramedical profession. Working from a general district hospital in Brighton, he set up an intensive training program for ambulance teams, equipped ambulances with defibrillators and electrocardiogram machines (ECG), and demonstrated through a series of rigorously documented studies that the service has saved. The only other city in the world where non-medical professionals used defibrillators at the time was Seattle in the United States.

Not content with the training of health professionals, he taught cardiopulmonary resuscitation (RCR) to more than 100,000 volunteers from his community in eastern Sussex, and deployed them to carry out tests of automatic defibrillators who became available in the 1980s. He was the main consultant of the Ministry of Health when he deployed his first experimental program of defibrillators in public places between 2000 and 2002. He showed that public members could react as quickly as health professionals and that they have saved many lives.

In 1971, shortly after taking his first position as a consultant as the only cardiologist at the County Hospital of Royal Sussex, Brighton, Chamberlain had the experience of losing a patient even if the ambulance had arrived in time. Faced with the skepticism of his medical colleagues, he decided to withdraw responsibility for the resuscitation of doctors and to give it to people who first reach a patient – the ambulance teams.

He trained them to intubate patients and give intravenous injections as well as to take ECGs and administer shocks of a defibrillator. In his hospital, he created the role of training officer in resuscitation, who made sure that nurses and other members of the hospital staff were also able to respond to a heart emergency. Each hospital has at least one.

From 1973, ambulance services in the United Kingdom were transferred from local authorities to the NHS, and Chamberlain played a decisive role to guarantee that what was known for the first time under the name of “extended ambulance staff” was on the agenda. In 1984, the University of York published a report, commissioned by the Department of Health, showing that there was a convincing case for a national paramedical service, with standard training packages provided by regional ambulance training schools.

Pilated in various regions, the service has been gradually deployed across the country. Paramedical paramedics were officially recognized as allied health professionals in 1999.

Chamberlain then developed the formation of paramedical paramedics as emergency care practitioners, who would perform tasks such as taking stories and prescription that was previously in the hands of doctors.

He combined a powerful will to get things done with an ability to build coalitions to advance his ideas. In the 1970s, he found that training in resuscitation in the community was a fragmentary affair, with organizations such as the Red Cross, St John’s Ambulance and the British Heart Foundation establishing their own standards.

During a drink, he brought together colleagues from other specialties, including anesthetics and emergency medicine, to found the community resuscitation council, later resuscitation council uk. The Council led conferences and published guidelines that obtained consensus through the specialties on how to approach the patients who had collapsed.

He continued to do the same for Europe, recruiting colleagues sharing the same ideas to create the European resuscitation council. His colleague and friend anesthesiologist Teter Peter Baskett awarded him “masterful persuasion and diplomacy” to finally bring the world together through the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR).

Born in Cardiff, Douglas was the eldest of three children from Roland Chamberlain, a coal merchant, and his wife May (Nee Meredith), who took care of the house. He had two sisters, Liz and Polly. The deep dyslexia of Douglas (then not recognized) led him to fail at school until the sympathetic advice of a teacher at the Ratcliffe College de Leicester, where his parents had sent him as a resident, allowed him to win a place to study medicine at the University of Cambridge.

He continued to qualify for medicine at St Bartholomew hospital in London in 1956. There he met a student colleague, Jennifer Ellison, and they got married in 1958. After a few short -term training articles, he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1959 to do his national service and was published in Germany, his service ending in December 1960 actor. He and Jennifer had four children in four years, the family initially set in Highgate, north of London.

Between 1962 and 1970, he returned to Barts and started a research program on heart rate and rhythm, investigating cardiac stimulators and drugs. Meanwhile, he spent a year as a research assistant at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, a period of training in the development of his interest in innovative treatments.

Chamberlain was among the first to test the effects of beta-blockers on heart rate in healthy volunteers and heart patients, and to carry out trials on amiodarone medication in patients with heart arrhythmias. Both classes of medication are now regular in heart patients.

In 1970, Chamberlain took his cardiology council at the Royal Sussex, where he continued an honorary position after his retirement in 2000, and remained honorary medical advisor to the South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust. In 1996, he also accepted an honorary professor of resuscitation medicine at the University of Cardiff, where he managed a research team, continuing to publish prolific and visit the world to give conferences. The cardiac arrest of the book: the science and the practice of resuscitation medicine, a massive volume which he co-edited with four colleagues, won the Cardiology Prize of the British Medical Association 2008.

Chamberlain received many other prizes, named CBE in 1988. His working ethics were legendary. Equally attached to patient care, research and teaching, he regularly worked until midnight. His roles of “good citizen” included the presidency of the governors of his local primary school as well as many professional committees. However, he has always had time to offer judicious advice to all those who asked him for help.

He is survived by Jennifer, his four children, Mary, Frances, Peter and David, nine grandchildren and his sisters.