This year, the ERC Guidelines 2025 have refined familiar approaches to cardiac arrest while adding new emphasis on prevention, recovery, and equity of care. If you’re involved in resuscitation as an instructor or trainer, the updates give clear direction on what matters most in both community and hospital settings.
Building on the Evidence
The ERC 2025 Guidelines pull together a vast body of evidence collected through the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR). Over a hundred systematic reviews and numerous evidence updates fed into this process over the last five years. Where the science was strong, the recommendations are firm. Where gaps remain, expert consensus has been sought to fill the space.
Deploying this method means the guidelines are a carefully judged balance of science, experience, and feasibility. The result is a set of resuscitation guidelines that reflect both the latest knowledge and the realities of delivering care.
A New Look at the Utstein Formula of Survival
One of the key takeaways from the new resuscitation guidelines is the prominence of the Utstein Formula of Survival, which demonstrates that outcomes improve drastically when high-quality science is matched by efficient education and solid local implementation.
The ERC’s education guidance doubles down on this and encourages trainers to build programmes that blend demonstration, deliberate practice, actionable feedback, and objective assessment. Education is framed as deliberate, feedback-driven, and context-specific. Programs are expected to go beyond knowledge transfer to cover practical skills, behaviours, and team performance in real-world settings. The guidelines also highlight that training needs to be measurable, with outcomes assessed in terms of competence, retention, and performance, not just attendance.
In practice, this means using platforms that let instructors shape the learning journey and run larger cohorts without losing fidelity. Programs like our own VivusCardio help you do exactly that. You can upload your own teaching videos to mirror local protocols, serve eLearning plus hands-on drills, capture real-time CPR metrics, and generate scored briefs for individuals and groups.
Broader Reach and Inclusivity
Another key change in the ERC 2025 Guidelines is a broadening of scope. They now look more closely at how recommendations can be applied across different healthcare contexts. Naturally, that includes high-resource hospitals, but also remote areas, low-income regions, and places where staff, equipment, or funding may be limited.
Equity and inclusion are built into the development process.
Tools like WHO’s equity frameworks were used to check that recommendations could be applied fairly across diverse populations. Considerations like gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and geography were all factored into decision-making. By making inclusivity a central theme, the ERC Guideline changes are working to ensure that every setting can adapt and apply the guidance, not just those with the most resources.
An important factor here is ensuring that training equipment accurately reflects the realities of different communities. Tools like Brayden OBI bring greater representation into training by reflecting the diversity of real communities, while still delivering the same objective CPR feedback needed for measurable learning. By aligning inclusivity with reliable performance data, they make it easier to apply the guidelines consistently across every setting.
Updates Across the Guidelines
Adult Basic and Advanced Life Support
For both basic life support (BLS) and advanced life support (ALS), the focus on high-quality chest compressions remains unchanged but is sharpened. The guidance stresses minimising interruptions and making full use of feedback devices to improve CPR quality. Defibrillation strategies are also clarified, with stronger recommendations on when and how shocks should be delivered.
Paediatric and Newborn Care
The ERC Guidelines 2025 include detailed recommendations for infants and children. These cover airway management, compression-to-breath ratios, and ventilation. For newborns, the advice on transition at birth is expanded, with clearer guidance on immediate interventions that support safe outcomes.
Powyżej: Brayden Baby
Special Circumstances
Learning from recent events, the ERC Guideline changes bring a broader coverage of resuscitation in special circumstances. This means situations such as pandemics, natural disasters, and resource-limited environments. The aim here is to make the guidance flexible enough to apply under pressure, even when systems are stretched.
Post-Resuscitation Care
The guidelines place further emphasis on what happens after return of spontaneous circulation. Recommendations on temperature management, neurological assessment, and long-term rehabilitation are clearer and more detailed. Survival with good brain function, rather than survival alone, is reinforced as the measure of success.
Ethics and Decision-Making
The new edition develops its section on ethics, too. It recognises the need for clarity around end-of-life care, treatment withdrawal, and patient wishes. Shared decision-making is actively encouraged, which goes some way to ensuring that care plans reflect both medical best practice and personal values.
Updated Data on Cardiac Arrest
The ERC Guidelines 2025 also provide an updated picture of cardiac arrest in Europe. Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest occurs at a rate of about 55 cases per 100,000 people each year. Most patients are men, and the average age is roughly 67. Around 70% of arrests happen in private locations.
The bystander CPR rate stands at 58%, though this varies widely across countries. The use of AEDs before emergency services arrive is still patchy, ranging from as low as 2.6% to as high as nearly 60%. Overall survival after out-of-hospital arrest averages 7.5%, but again the differences between countries are striking.
For in-hospital cardiac arrest, the incidence is estimated at 1.5 to 2.8 per 1,000 admissions. The guidelines point out that only a handful of countries have adopted a single national emergency number for in-hospital arrest, which shows clear room for improvement.
Transparent and Inclusive Development
The way the ERC 2025 Guidelines were developed is also worth noting. The process included public consultation, with over 800 responses received, many from national councils. Efforts were made to make the writing groups more diverse and representative of society as a whole, with a greater gender balance, younger contributors, and wider international representation compared with 2021.
Education and Training
The theme of education runs throughout the ERC Guidelines 2025. Training is not just about initial skill learning, but about long-term retention, confidence, and adaptability. The guidelines encourage the use of feedback devices, simulationoraz scalable training models to maintain competence.
Want Your CPR Training to Align with ERC Guidelines 2025?
The latest ERC Guideline changes show that prevention, high-quality CPR, equity in care, and long-term recovery are brought to the fore. For trainers, this means adapting teaching methods, resources, and assessment strategies to stay aligned with the ERC Guidelines in 2025.
Nasz Manekiny Brayden i online platform are designed to reflect the latest priorities in the resuscitation guidelines. Real-time feedback ensures CPR performance aligns with evidence-based standards, while integrated data capture supports long-term skill development and assessment.
Combining hands-on realism with digital insight gives you access to a comprehensive training solution that keeps practice consistent with the latest ERC Guideline changes. If you want to find out more about how Innosonian can support you, then Skontaktuj się z naszym zespołem today.
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