Are watches in the ambulances and the Emergency Department synchronized?

Background Prognostication in patients with cardiac arrest (CA) is (amongst other things) dependent on the duration of the CA. However in patients with out-of-hospital CA, the patient is often handed over from the ambulance crew to hospital staff. During the hand-over ambulance crews often present a printed summary of events during the resuscitation attempt from the defibrillator. As treatment for the CA is started in the prehospital phase, the hospital staff needs reliable information on the duration of the CA in order to prognosticate the patient properly. It is therefore important that the ambulance crew and the hospital staff use watches that are synchronized. Unsynchronized watches can lead to both over and underestimation of the duration of the CA. The aim of our study was to examine if the watches in defibrillators in ambulances were synchronized with the wall mounted clocks at Emergency Departments (ED).