First responders are tasked with doing everything in their power to save people’s lives. Unfortunately, they must sometimes make the challenging decision to stop resuscitation. However, a new study suggests that the current guidelines for stopping resuscitation in cardiac arrest victims don’t have enough evidence to distinguish who will survive and who won’t.
“Our findings suggest that [termination of resuscitation] rules may miss substantial numbers of survivors,” the researchers wrote in their study. They found the Termination of Resuscitation (TOR) rules lacked the ability “to discriminate between those patients who will die and those who will survive. The authors evaluated each guideline for its ability to distinguish survivors from non-survivors.
The Petrie and ALS rules failed to reach acceptable standards, whereas both BLS and Shibahashi 1 achieved acceptable performance. The UTOR, Marsden, and Goto 1 rules performed excellently, with UTOR and Goto 1 being the best. The authors found that BLS had the potential to miss more than 1 percent of survivors, while the other guidelines could miss up to 1 percent of survivors.
No shock is delivered The cardiac arrest was not witnessed by EMS personnel or a bystander Bystanders provided no CPR There is no return of spontaneous circulation prior to transport The researchers concluded that there is minimal evidence that current TOR rules can discriminate between patients who will die and those who will survive. They wr.