BLS VS. CPR: What's The Difference?

The ability to administer emergency life support at dire moments is an impressive addition to anyone’s repertoire. Having such a quality helps a lot when it comes to both the healthcare profession and day-to-day jobs.

It adds extra benefit to whoever is employing you and makes you look like a potential hero waiting to save lives.

So, we are most familiar with the term CPR, but when a term like BLS comes into question, most of us are oblivious. So it’s important for everyone to know the difference between BLS and CPR. And that is where we come in. We have prepared this short article to explain this difference wide and clear. So, let’s start.

What Is CPR?

The first thing that we want to address is CPR itself. So, what does CPR actually mean?

Well, CPR or Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation is an emergency life support procedure that focuses on chest compressions to create a kind of artificial function of ventilation. Whenever someone loses consciousness due to drowning in water or a stroke, CPR helps maintain the function of their brain.

Along with keeping the brain alive, CPR also restores the blood circulation in a person’s body if done right. While doing chest compressions, you have to provide a flow of air in their mouth to keep the ventilation going. If oxygen isn’t present, you can implement a mouth-to-mouth ventilation technique to make up for it.

“If done right” holds a lot of weight here. That is why, to administer CPR, a person needs to be professionally trained. So, not everyone can do CPR when a person needs rescuing because you might end up causing damage. So only try it if you are authorized to do so by a certified training facility.

Now, CPR won’t start the heart. It isn’t meant to do so. It merely maintains the blood circulation to let the circulation keep flowing as the patient’s body tries to recover. So, don’t expect it to jumpstart the heart like a defibrillator.

What Is BLS?

Now that you know about CPR, you might be wondering what BLS is and how it differs. Well, here’s the fun part, BLS is CPR. Well, that’ll just confuse. Let’s make it clearer. BLS is a level of CPR which qualifies as medical care. It’s more like a sort of CPR carried out by a healthcare professional.

Well, BLS stands for Basic Life Support, this is the kind of CPR that is done by a professional when they come across a victim of a life-threatening situation. That might an illness or an injury. They carry out this procedure until the victim reaches the hospital for full medical care.

Difference Between Paraplegic and Quadriplegic

BLS Vs. CPR

So, now that you have a concept of what both BLS and CPR are, you should already have an idea of the difference between these two procedures. So, the basic difference between them is that BLS is an advanced form of CPR that is designed for healthcare professionals.

Therefore, we can say that CPR can be carried out by any trained individual, and anyone can get training for CPR from a certified training center. On the other hand, only healthcare professionals can get training for BLS.

Another difference to be noted is that CPR can be administered even in minor cases. But BLS is only applied in case of life-threatening situations. Moreover, it also needs a proper external artificial ventilation device to carry out.

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The Comparison in a Nutshell

Now that the differences are clear, we would like to summarize the whole comparison. Here goes:

CPR	BLS
A procedure that uses chest compressions and artificial ventilation to maintain blood circulation.	An advanced form of CPR
This procedure can be learned by any individual.	It is only viable for healthcare professionals.
You can carry this out even in minor cases.	Healthcare professionals perform this only in case of life-threatening situations.
It doesn’t need external devices to be performed.	This process needs an artificial ventilation device to administer.

Conclusion

That was all we had on the difference between BLS and CPR. Now, we hope that all this information actually helps you out. Since you know the difference now, we would like to urge you to spread this information and create awareness.

Now that you know the difference properly, please take proper training for CPR as it’ll always be helpful in your life to keep such an ability in your books. Other than that, we would really appreciate some feedback from your side.

So, if you feel we missed out on something or there’s some other topic that we can discuss, contact us.

Stay safe and tread carefully.