It’s never a good idea to have a heart attack, much less cardiac arrest. But if you do, you could be significantly better off having it in Cranberry. At the July 26 Township Board of Supervisors meeting, the Cranberry Township Emergency Medical Service, CTEMS, was honored by the American Heart Association for its continuing involvement in the Association’s Mission Lifeline-EMS program. The award recognizes emergency medical services for care strategies that allow them to quickly identify suspected heart attack patients, promptly notify a nearby medical center, and trigger an early response from waiting hospital personnel. CTEMS’s success was recently confirmed by a report issued by the national Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival. It showed that the survival rate for the 22 cardiac arrest patients who had been treated by Cranberry EMS in 2017 was well above the national average: 50 percent versus 36.5 percent. CTEMS is one of only 497 of the 20,000 EMS agencies in the U.S. to receive this award.