• Marine Riou, Stephen Ball, Teresa A Williams, Austin Whiteside, Kay L O'Halloran, Janet Bray, Gavin D Perkins, Peter Cameron, Daniel M Fatovich, Madoka Inoue, Paul Bailey, Deon Brink, Karen Smith, Phillip Della, and Judith Finn.
• Prehospital, Resuscitation and Emergency Care Research Unit (PRECRU), School of Nursing, Midwifery and Paramedicine, Curtin University, Bentley, Australia.
• BMJ Open. 2017 Jul 9; 7 (7): e016510.

IntroductionEmergency telephone calls placed by bystanders are crucial to the recognition of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), fast ambulance dispatch and initiation of early basic life support. Clear and efficient communication between caller and call-taker is essential to this time-critical emergency, yet few studies have investigated the impact that linguistic factors may have on the nature of the interaction and the resulting trajectory of the call. This research aims to provide a better understanding of communication factors impacting on the accuracy and timeliness of ambulance dispatch.Methods And AnalysisA dataset of OHCA calls and their corresponding metadata will be analysed from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining linguistic analysis and health services research. The calls will be transcribed and coded for linguistic and interactional variables and then used to answer a series of research questions about the recognition of OHCA and the delivery of basic life-support instructions to bystanders. Linguistic analysis of calls will provide a deeper understanding of the interactional dynamics between caller and call-taker which may affect recognition and dispatch for OHCA. Findings from this research will translate into recommendations for modifications of the protocols for ambulance dispatch and provide directions for further research.Ethics And DisseminationThe study has been approved by the Curtin University Human Research Ethics Committee (HR128/2013) and the St John Ambulance Western Australia Research Advisory Group. Findings will be published in peer-reviewed journals and communicated to key audiences, including ambulance dispatch professionals.© Article author(s) (or their employer(s) unless otherwise stated in the text of the article) 2017. All rights reserved. No commercial use is permitted unless otherwise expressly granted.

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