[Impact of a public-directed media campaign on emergency call to a mobile intensive care units center for acute chest pain].

Cardiovascular diseases represent the second highest cause of mortality among the 25-65 age group in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region. The Monica study clearly showed that in 1996 the average length of time between a casualty showing the first signs of a coronary and the commencement of treatment was 3 h 30 in northern region of France compared with an average of 2 hours for the rest of the country. Many factors play a part: lack of knowledge of the symptoms, ignorance of the benefits of making an early call to the ambulance, lack of awareness of the french emergency services- centre 15 and its role, absence of any structured network for coronary emergencies. Given these observations, an extensive regional informative campaign is being launched for the first time in France, which will involve all relevant health professionals. The 2 aims of this campaign are to encourage people to call centre 15 directly and as quickly as possible after noticing the first coronary symptoms, and to encourage general practitioners (GPs) to "prescribe calling centre 15". The impact of this campaign has been estimated using the descriptive analysis of the relationship between the number of calls made to centre 15 by the general public and doctors and the number of successful prehospital interventions by the mobile emergency unit of Lille in cases of coronaries and thrombosis. The results of 3 telephone surveys of 1200 people carried out by the emergency services and 2 surveys carried out by a private company were also used for this evaluation. The analysis of this data provides a wealth of arguments in favour of the effectiveness of the campaign. On one hand this is due to the quality of its contents, which we compared to a similar campaign and on the other hand it is due to its lengthy duration.