Closing the Gap: Optimizing Performance to Reduce Interruptions in Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation*

Objectives: The American Heart Association recommends minimizing pauses of chest compressions and defines high performance resuscitation as achieving a chest compression fraction greater than 80%. We hypothesize that interruption times are excessively long, leading to an unnecessarily large impact on chest compression fraction. Design: A retrospective study using video review of a convenience sample of clinically realistic in situ simulated pulseless electrical activity cardiopulmonary arrests. Setting: Johns Hopkins Children’s Center; September 2013 to June 2017. Patients: Twenty-two simulated patients. Interventions: A framework was developed to characterize interruptions. Two new metrics were defined as follows: interruption time excess (the difference between actual and guideline-indicated allowable duration of interruption from compressions), and chest compression fraction potential (chest compression fraction with all interruption time excess excluded). Measurements and Main Results: Descriptive statistics were generated for interruption-level and event-level variables. Differences between median chest compression fraction and chest compression fraction potential were assessed using Wilcoxon rank-sum test. Comparisons of interruption proportion before and after the first 5 minutes were assessed using the X2 test statistic. Seven-hundred sixty-six interruptions occurred over 22 events. Median event duration was 463.0 seconds (interquartile range, 397.5...
Source: Pediatric Critical Care Medicine - Category: Pediatrics Tags: Online Clinical Investigations Source Type: research