Quick defibrillation can increase the chances of survival for hospital patients who have cardiac arrest. But sometimes the treatment is not quick enough.
The American Heart Association recommends that defibrillation, a process in which an electronic device gives the heart an electric shock , be performed within two minutes of cardiac arrest. Defibrillation helps restore normal contraction rhythms in a heart having dangerous arrhythmia or in cardiac arrest. The longer the delay, the less chance the patient has of surviving.
A new study finds that delays are not due to overloaded or undereducated staff. Previous studies have linked delays to other factors, such as being admitted to the hospital for something other than heart problems or having cardiac arrest at night or on weekends.
According to study, records from nearly 7,500 adult in-patients with cardiac arrest at 200 U.S. hospitals were analyzed. The hospitals completed a detailed survey that included information about the location, hospital teaching status, number of patient beds and the availability of automatic external defibrillators.
The rates of delayed defibrillation — a delay being longer than two minutes — varied from 2.4 percent to more than 50 percent between hospitals, according to the report published in the July 27 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.
Differences between hospitals accounted for a great deal of the variation, the researchers found. In one example, patients with identical characteristics had a 46 percent higher chance of having a delayed defibrillation at one hospital compared with another.
Patients at hospitals with fewer defibrillation delays were less likely to die in the hospital. The odds of survival were 41 percent higher in the 25 percent of hospitals with the lowest rates of delays when compared with the 25 percent of hospitals with the most delays, according to the study.
Tags: cardiac arrest, defibrillation, heart attack, hospitals