Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest phone detection: Those who most need chest compressions are the most difficult to recognize

‘ She’s sort of breathing ’: What linguistic factors determine call-taker recognition of agonal breathing in emergency calls for cardiac arrest?

“…As previously recommended in the literature, [18] our results emphasise the importance of listening to the details of what callers say. In their commentary [33] about recent changes to the MPDS (version 13.0), Clawson & Patterson discussed how a second-party caller (a bystander) may say the words "can't breathe" to describe ineffective breathing, but the same words coming from a first-party caller (the patient) who is able to utter them are more appropriately described as breathing with difficulty, rather than breathing ineffectively.…”

“…However, even with such descriptors in place, agonal breathing remains a major barrier to the recognition of OHCA at dispatch and thus delays initiation of bystander-CPR [11,[16][17][18] Interpreting what callers say is not just a matter of which keywords are said, but also of the overall context of their answers. This study aimed to determine whether the type of sentence used by callers in response to the question "Is s/he breathing?"…”

Public Access Defibrillation: Great benefit and potential but infrequently used

“…27 Finally, identification of OHCA by the dispatcher represents a challenge in itself in order to refer a bystander to an AED. 28,29 Means to increase AED utilisation should target public awareness of the AED network and the location of the AEDs, CPR and AED training, and further development of the existing AED network and linkage to the EMD with special attention on placing AEDs outside, providing accessibility at all times.…”

Comparison of Medical Priority Dispatch (MPD) and Criteria Based Dispatch (CBD) relating to cardiac arrest calls

“…In all the three papers in this thesis, this data point has been reported, ranging from median 2.8 minutes in the post-intervention period in paper III to 4.3 minutes in the MPD site (R-EMCC) in paper I. Other studies have reported similar time intervals, ranging from 2.9 minutes to 4.8 minutes(27,31,33,34, 36,105,107). Best-practice benchmarks for time to first compression are not well established.…”

“…Key observations in cardiac arrest are unresponsiveness and abnormal breathing (18). Recognition of cardiac arrest is challenging both for bystanders and EMDs, mainly due to the presence of agonal breathing (27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32). Studies on recognition of cardiac arrest by EMDs report wide variations; between 56 and 98% of OHCA are recognised by EMDs (27,30,(32)(33)(34)(35)(36)(37).…”