Telephone-CPR and Recognizing Out-Of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest: Analyzing Chief Complaints to Identify Delays

Abstract

Survival from cardiac arrest remains low.1 Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) has been proven to increase a cardiac arrest patient’s chance of survival.2 Telephone-assisted CPR (T-CPR) instructions have been shown to improve the proportion of patients who receive CPR from bystanders in an out-of-hospital setting.1 Our study sought to identify delays to recognizing out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and initiating telecommunicator-assisted CPR by analyzing the chief complaints of 449 real calls in which cardiac arrest was determined to have occurred. Previously-collected data from the STAT 911 parent study was used in our analysis.3,4 Chief complaints were categorized into four codes distinguished by the callers’ description of the patient’s breathing. Survival curves were created and analyzed for statistical significance. Our results showed no statistically significant difference in the time to recognition of the need for CPR or in the time to first compression by the description of patient breathing given in the caller’s chief complaint.