Abstract
We have followed up patients suffering from out of hospital cardiac arrest, both of cardiac and non-cardiac aetiology, who have been attending a specific project in Oslo. Period May 2003 June 2005. The information has been collected from the paramedic standard journal and the hospital journal. Of 323 incidents, 34 (11%) are discharged form hospital. Of the group of patients who are brought to hospital, 78% are treated in intensive care unit. Of these 40% are discharged from hospital. The patients who are discharged from hospital have higher initial pH-value (p=0,006). It seems that these patients also have higher initial systolic blood pressure (p=0,11), less need of blood pressure support during treatment and require more time on respirator. Events in the chain that saves lives are recorded both by AMK (emergency medicine control center) and the paramedics. AMK has been found to record events two minutes later than the paramedics (p=0,001). We find reason to believe that this leads to systematic errors when calculating the ambulance response time based on AMK records.