OBJECTIVES To determine whether earlier clinical intervention by a medical emergency team prompted by clinical instability in a patient could reduce the incidence of and mortality from unexpected cardiac arrest in hospital. DESIGN A non-randomised, population based study before (1996) and after (1999) introduction of the medical emergency team. SETTING 300 bed tertiary referral teaching hos...

The mortality rate post admission to hospital after successful resuscitation from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is high, with significant variation between regions and individual institutions. While prehospital factors such as age, bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation and total cardiac arrest time are known to influence outcome, several aspects of post-resuscitative care including therapeut...

INTRODUCTION Exercise-related cardiac arrest is uncommon, however it is devastating when it occurs in otherwise healthy adults. This study aims to identify the characteristics of exercise-related cardiac arrest in the study population and estimate the overall survival rate. MATERIALS AND METHODS This is a retrospective observational study of exercise-related cardiac arrest in Singapore. Patie...

BACKGROUND Despite intensive efforts over many years, the United States has made limited progress in improving rates of survival from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Recently, national organizations, such as the American Heart Association, have focused on promoting bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation, use of automated external defibrillators, and other performance improvement efforts. MET...

BACKGROUND Dispatcher-assisted cardiopulmonary resuscitation (DA-CPR) attempts to improve the management of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest by laypersons who are unable to recognize cardiac arrest and are unfamiliar with CPR. Therefore, we investigated the sensitivity and specificity of our new DA-CPR protocol for achieving implementation of bystander CPR in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest victim...