The primary objectives of this study are to describe using the Utstein criteria, the characteristics of patients presenting to the emergency department after out of hospital cardiac arrest and to examine the rate of survival to hospital discharge at AUMBC. 

Study design: Retrospective chart review

All adult patients (age 18 and above) who presented to AUBMC ED and were found to have absence signs of circulation except those who fit the following exclusion criteria

Patients with presumed non cardiac etiology of arrest (Noncardiac causes of cardiac arrest are often obvious and easy to determine. Specific subcategories include drug overdose, suicide, drowning ,hypoxia,  exsanguination, cerebrovascular accident, subarachnoid hemorrhage, and trauma),  patient transferred from other hospitals for further management of cardiac arrest, patients who are immediately pronounced dead on scene and for whom resuscitation is not attempted, including those with decapitation, rigor mortis, and dependent lividity. Patients with known ‘‘do not attempt resuscitation’’ orders will also be included and described in the study population demographics and etiology of arrest and calculation of overall survival rate but will be excluded from the calculation of survival rate of specific OHCA from presumed cardiac etiology.

This study will consist of a retrospective chart review of all adult patients (age 18 years or older) who had out-of-hospital non-traumatic cardiac arrest and were admitted to the Emergency Medicine at AUBMC in the period July 1st 2009- December 31, 2013.  The following patient data elements will be abstracted from the database of the Electronic Health Records(EHR): patient age and gender, the site of occurrence of arrest, availability of witnesses, performance of resuscitation(CPR), the number of defibrillation attempts, the response time, the interventions done in the ED, the discharge status of the patient from the hospital(alive or dead). The data collection tool that will be utilized for this study is the Utstein template for reporting data on cardiac arrest [6]. The Utstein template is a standardized tool that has been established in order to ensure uniform reporting of data from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

An estimated sample size of around 374 cases will constitute our study population based on available cardiac arrest cases who presented to AUBMC during the study period.