It looks like I'm starting to get a few hits on this blog, which encourages me to keep posting. I assume all of the hits are from the link on the In-Hospital Defibrillation site.
I have just started again to track time intervals in the first minutes of resuscitation attempts at my hospital. It seems to me that it's really quite easy to do, and it puzzles me that no one apparently is doing it. (More about the method later.) I have talked at various times with various people involved in the National Registry of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (NRCPR) about problems with their reporting of time-interval data, so far with little effect. The basic problem is that they are reporting time intervals based on handwritten records which are quite clearly invalid. For example, over 25% of time intervals from arrest to first defibrillation are reported as "0 minutes," or instantaneous--nice trick if you can manage it. In my view, this lack of rigor is preventing the NRCPR from fulfilling its most important task: compiling good aggregate statistics showing definitively that there are serious delays in defibrillation in hospitals. Instead, the “data” reported so far seem to show that everything is just fine: see Peberdy MA, Kaye W, Ornato JP, Larkin GL, Nadkarni V, Mancini ME, Berg RA, Nichol G, Truitt TL. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation of adults in the hospital: A report of 14,720 cardiac arrests from the National Registry of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation. Resuscitation 2003;58:297-308.
