Checklists and consistency of care after resuscitation from in-hospital cardiac arrest: A pilot study

In-hospital cardiac arrest (IHCA) with the return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC) is a clinical scenario associated with potentially devastating outcomes.

Inconsistencies in post-ROSC care exist and we sought to find a low cost way to decrease this variability.

We obtained pre and post intervention metrics including percentage of IHCA with a timely electrocardiogram (ECG), arterial blood gas (ABG), physician documentation, and documentation of patient surrogate communication after ROSC.

We developed and implemented a post-ROSC checklist for IHCA and measured post-ROSC clinical care delivery metrics at our hospital during a 1-year pilot period.

After the introduction of the checklist, 83.7% of IHCA had an ECG within 1 h of ROSC, compared to a baseline of 62.8% (p = 0.01). The rate of physician documentation within 6 h of ROSC was 74.4% after introduction of the checklist, compared to a baseline of 49.5% (p < 0.01). The percentage of IHCA with ROSC that completed all four of the critical post-ROSC tasks after the introduction of the post-ROSC checklist was 51.1% as compared to 19.4% before implementation (p < 0.01).

Our study demonstrated improved consistency in completing post-ROSC clinical tasks after the introduction of a post-ROSC checklist to our hospital. This work suggests that the implementation of a checklist can have meaningful impacts on task completion in the post-ROSC setting. Despite this, considerable inconsistencies in post-ROSC care persisted after the intervention indicating the limits of checklists in this setting. Future work is needed to identify interventions that can further improve post-ROSC processes of care.