Resuscitation Council UK

About us

Resuscitation Council UK is saving lives by developing guidelines, influencing policy, delivering courses and supporting cutting-edge research. Through education, training and research, we’re working towards the day when everyone in the country has the skills they need to save a life.

Our vision

Resuscitation Council UK’s core mission is to ensure that everyone who has a cardiac arrest has access to appropriate cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

We have four key aims that we are determined to achieve in partnership across the resuscitation community and with other key stakeholders:

• Everyone should receive appropriate cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) treatment in clinical, community and care settings, underpinned by the comprehensive availability of evidence-based clinical guidelines, training and life-long learning. 

• Survival rates for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest match world-leading comparators. 

• Everyone affected by involvement in a Cardiac Arrest (CA) and the provision of cardiopulmonary resuscitation receives appropriate, personalised support. 

• Cardiopulmonary resuscitation has become a mechanism to reduce social inequalities, not another measure of them.

For us, these goals mean equipping health and social care professionals with cutting-edge, evidence-based resuscitation guidelines and training, as well as ensuring members of the public learn CPR skills, so more people are given a chance of survival in an emergency. 

It also means developing support services for all those involved in, or impacted by, resuscitation. We care about ensuring resuscitation preferences are respected, so it means seeing conversations that support CPR decision-making normalised through shared decision-making processes such as ReSPECT. 

And as the inequalities in survival rates are unacceptable to us, it means developing greater understanding of why there are differences in attitudes and public access to CPR training, disparities in access to defibrillators, and how we can work with others to change this.

Achieving change on this scale will be a big challenge. It will need to be achieved by working with a wide spectrum of partners, listening to people with their own experience of cardiac arrest or CPR decision making and engaging the entire resuscitation community.