How a Cardiac Arrest Survival Chain Worked on Marathon Day

When Mel Baker’s heart stopped on her way home from the 2024 London Marathon, her survival depended on a chain of crews, equipment and a hospital pathway working exactly as designed. That chain was on display recently when the 52-year-old from Somerset returned to London to meet, at the London Ambulance Service’s Waterloo headquarters, the paramedics and police officers whose actions kept her alive.

The operational story begins at the scene. Baker had spent the day in the capital with her daughter Nichea, 26, watching a friend run the marathon. On the journey home she collapsed. Bystanders were nearby, a 999 call was made, and crews arrived quickly. Officers from City of London Police, some of them already deployed at the event, and paramedics from London Ambulance Service began resuscitation, delivering chest compressions and defibrillation. Police officers had defibrillated Baker once by the time the ambulance crews reached her. Yet her heart would not restart.

What happened next is the part of the delivery that mattered most. Rather than being taken first to an Emergency Department, Baker was placed on a specialist pathway that allowed paramedics on scene to contact the nearest ECMO centre at St Bartholomew’s Hospital directly, alerting the team there that a patient was inbound. Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation, known as ECMO, takes over the work of the heart and lungs, supplying oxygenated blood to vital organs while doctors treat the underlying cause of the cardiac arrest. Baker is the first survivor to benefit from the new protocol, which gives paramedics direct access to a specialist team and specialist equipment without an Emergency Department stop in between. The service states that without this intervention she would be unlikely to have survived.

Keir Rutherford, Advanced Paramedic in Critical Care at the service, described the sequence from the crews’ perspective. “When we arrived, Mel had been defibrillated once by police officers but unfortunately remained in cardiac arrest. Timely intervention during cardiac arrest is key to maximise chances of survival,” he said. He credited her survival to the fast actions of everyone who responded, including the paramedics, the police officers and the clinicians at St Bartholomew’s, adding that without them she would have died. He also framed the case as evidence of the service’s commitment to clinical innovation, noting that it is constantly working to improve the care delivered to patients, including those in cardiac arrest.

For the patient and her family, the reunion at Waterloo was the chance to close the loop with the people behind the response. Baker said meeting the paramedics and police officers was amazing, that she felt she had to thank them, and that they saved her life. Words on paper had not seemed enough, she explained, so the meeting itself was perfect. She described their response as absolutely amazing and said that without it she would not be standing there today.

Meanwhile, Nichea recalled how quickly events unfolded and how frightening the moment was. “It was really scary. I was on my own and I panicked as I wasn’t sure what was going on,” she said, describing how her mother dropped to the floor as they headed home after the day in London. Bystanders were close by, she said, they called 999, and the paramedics and police officers arrived very quickly and performed CPR. Without them, her mother would not be here today.

The service is inviting the public to support its work by becoming a London Lifesaver or donating to the Heart Starters campaign. Whether the protocol that saved Baker becomes a template for more cardiac arrest patients across the capital may be the next question for the crews who now know it can work.