Objective-To determine the circumstances, incidence, and outcome of cardiopulmonary resuscitation in British hospitals.Design-Hospitals registered all cardiopulmonary resuscitation attempts for 12 months or longer and followed survival to one year.Setting-12 metropolitan, provincial, teaching, and non-teaching hospitals across Britain.Subjects-3765 patients in whom a resuscitation attempt was performed, including 927 in whom the onset of arrest was outside the hospital.Main outcome measure-Survival after initial resuscitation, at 24 hours, at discharge from hospital, and at one year, calculated by the life Conclusion-71% of the mortality at one year in patients undergoing attempted resuscitation occurred during the initial arrest. Hospital resuscitation is life saving and cost effective and warrants appropriate attention, training, coordination, and equipment.
IntroductionThe United Kingdom Resuscitation Council was established in 1982 to foster improved knowledge and practice of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. At this time the subject was comparatively neglected in Britain compared with the United States.' 2 As part of a wider programme'-5 the council organised a multicentre study of the circumstances, incidence, and outcome of cardiopulmonary resuscitation in hospital aimed at determining what is happening in a part of hospital practice not covered by routine statistics; developing a standard method of recording arrests that could be used for audit, clinical trials, and, possibly, community studies; and providing a British baseline against which results from other countries, changing management, and future surveys could be assessed.6 This first paper describes the methods and overall results, with survival followed to one year. Detailed analysis of subgroups will be reported elsewhere.
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