• Jouni Nurmi, Ville Pettilä, Björn Biber, Markku Kuisma, Rauni Komulainen, and Maaret Castrén.
• Uusimaa EMS, Department of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, Helsinki University Hospital, Finland. jouni.nurmi@helsinki.fi
• Resuscitation. 2006 Sep 1;70(3):463-9.

ObjectivesThe objective of the study was to assess the effect of protocol compliance to the accuracy of cardiac arrest (CA) identification by the dispatchers.MethodsThe study was conducted prospectively over a 1-year period in 1996. The calls categorized as non-traumatic CAs by the dispatcher and calls where the patient was in non-traumatic CA when ambulance crew arrived were included in the study. The data was collected from emergency call tape recordings and ambulance run sheets. The compliance to the protocol was defined as gathering information to two questions: (1) Is the patient awake or can she/he be awakened? and (2) Is she/he breathing normally?ResultsThe number of calls included in the study was 776 and the dispatchers identified 83% of the CAs. The protocol was adhered in 52.4% of calls, more often in witnessed than unwitnessed cases (72.3% versus 45.0%, P<0.001). In correctly identified CAs, the protocol compliance was 49.4%. The compliance was higher in cases of unidentified CAs (60.3%, P=0.0326) and in cases of wrongly identified as CAs (false positives, 61.9%, P=0.0276).ConclusionsA high identification rate of CAs seems to be achievable despite poor protocol compliance by dispatchers.

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