[Immediate Cardiac Life Support (ICLS) course developed by Japanese Association for Acute Medicine].

The Immediate Cardiac Life Support (ICLS) course was developed and launched by Japanese Association for Acute Medicine (JAAM) for resident training, in April 2002. The ICLS course is designed as multi-professional one-day (8 hours) resuscitation course and teaches the essential skills and team dynamics required to manage a patient in cardiac arrest for 10 minutes before the arrival of a cardiovascular specialist. The course consists of skill stations and scenario stations. The skill stations provide basic life support (BLS) with automated external defibrillator (AED), basic airway management and in-hospital management with electrocardiographic (ECG) monitoring with manual external defibrillator. In total, 117,246 candidates attended 6,971 ICLS courses until the end of December 2010. Furthermore, we developed additional course of ICLS to manage stroke, Immediate Stroke Life Support (ISLS). We also describe the development and structure of, and rationale for the ICLS course.