Interdisciplinary ICU cardiac arrest debriefing improves survival outcomes*

In-hospital cardiac arrest is an important public health problem. High-quality resuscitation improves survival but is difficult to achieve. Our objective is to evaluate the effectiveness of a novel, interdisciplinary, postevent quantitative debriefing program to improve survival outcomes after in-hospital pediatric chest compression events.

Single-center prospective interventional study of children who received chest compressions between December 2008 and June 2012 in the ICU.

Structured, quantitative, audiovisual, interdisciplinary debriefing of chest compression events with front-line providers.

Primary outcome was survival to hospital discharge. Secondary outcomes included survival of event (return of spontaneous circulation for ≥ 20 min) and favorable neurologic outcome. Primary resuscitation quality outcome was a composite variable, termed "excellent cardiopulmonary resuscitation," prospectively defined as a chest compression depth ≥ 38 mm, rate ≥ 100/min, ≤ 10% of chest compressions with leaning, and a chest compression fraction > 90% during a given 30-second epoch. Quantitative data were available only for patients who are 8 years old or older. There were 119 chest compression events (60 control and 59 interventional). The intervention was associated with a trend toward improved survival to hospital discharge on both univariate analysis (52% vs 33%, p = 0.054) and after controlling for confounders (adjusted odds ratio, 2.5; 95% CI, 0.91-6.8; p = 0.075), and it significantly increased survival with favorable neurologic outcome on both univariate (50% vs 29%, p = 0.036) and multivariable analyses (adjusted odds ratio, 2.75; 95% CI, 1.01-7.5; p = 0.047). Cardiopulmonary resuscitation epochs for patients who are 8 years old or older during the debriefing period were 5.6 times more likely to meet targets of excellent cardiopulmonary resuscitation (95% CI, 2.9-10.6; p < 0.01).

Implementation of an interdisciplinary, postevent quantitative debriefing program was significantly associated with improved cardiopulmonary resuscitation quality and survival with favorable neurologic outcome.