Run more cardiac arrests get better outcomes

[paramedicmike]

This story has popped up in a couple of my news feeds over the past few days.  Thought it was interesting.

Reuters link.

Medscape link. (May require a log-in.)

Essentially, the more cardiac arrests you run the better the survival rate.  There were some limitations to the research.  It's an observational study.  It says survival to hospital discharge but I haven't seen anything about how neurologically intact any of them are.  However, some of the findings they note were interesting.  Years of experience as a paramedic didn't count.  It was observed that the more often paramedics encountered an out of hospital arrest the less the chance of the paramedic deciding to work it.  Eleven percent of the paramedics involved over the nine years of the study didn't encounter a single cardiac arrest (which makes me wonder who these folks were... admin, supervisors, people who retired/resigned early on... nothing I've seen goes into detail).

[Off Label]

Like the New York cabby said  to the kid visiting New York city for her big chance in show biz when she asked him how to get to Carnegie Hall: "Practice, practice, practice."

[rock_shoes]

On 2/18/2016 at 10:09 AM, paramedicmike said:

This story has popped up in a couple of my news feeds over the past few days.  Thought it was interesting.

Reuters link.

Medscape link. (May require a log-in.)

Essentially, the more cardiac arrests you run the better the survival rate.  There were some limitations to the research.  It's an observational study.  It says survival to hospital discharge but I haven't seen anything about how neurologically intact any of them are.  However, some of the findings they note were interesting.  Years of experience as a paramedic didn't count.  It was observed that the more often paramedics encountered an out of hospital arrest the less the chance of the paramedic deciding to work it.  Eleven percent of the paramedics involved over the nine years of the study didn't encounter a single cardiac arrest (which makes me wonder who these folks were... admin, supervisors, people who retired/resigned early on... nothing I've seen goes into detail).

The obvious bit doesn't surprise me a whole lot. Mastery takes practice. Opportunity for skill mastery and the resultant patient outcomes are the single greatest check mark in favour of tiered and targeted deployment of urban EMS systems. The interesting piece here, is that greater exposure was corollary with a lower propensity to work any given arrest. The assertion I read from this wording is that more experienced providers are more likely to recognize both viable and non viable resuscitations.