• Marine Riou, Stephen Ball, Austin Whiteside, Janet Bray, Gavin D Perkins, Karen Smith, Kay L O'Halloran, Daniel M Fatovich, Madoka Inoue, Paul Bailey, Peter Cameron, Deon Brink, and Judith Finn.
• Prehospital, Resuscitation and Emergency Care Research Unit (PRECRU), School of Nursing, Midwifery and Paramedicine, Curtin University, Bentley, WA, 6102, Australia. Electronic address: marine.riou@curtin.edu.au.
• Resuscitation. 2018 Dec 1; 133: 95-100.

BackgroundIn emergency ambulance calls for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), dispatcher-assisted cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) plays a crucial role in patient survival. We examined whether the language used by dispatchers to initiate CPR had an impact on callers' agreement to perform CPR.MethodsWe analysed 424 emergency calls relating to cases of paramedic-confirmed OHCA where OHCA was recognised by the dispatcher, the caller was with the patient, and resuscitation was attempted by paramedics. We investigated the linguistic choices used by dispatchers to initiate CPR, and the impact of those choices on caller agreement to perform CPR.ResultsOverall, CPR occurred in 85% of calls. Caller agreement was low (43%) when dispatchers used terms of willingness ("do you want to do CPR?"). Caller agreement was high (97% and 84% respectively) when dispatchers talked about CPR in terms of futurity ("we are going to do CPR") or obligation ("we need to do CPR"). In 38% (25/66) of calls where the caller initially declined CPR, the dispatcher eventually secured their agreement by making several attempts at initiating CPR.ConclusionThere is potential for increased agreement to perform CPR if dispatchers are trained to initiate CPR with words of futurity and/or obligation.Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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