Not Bad For a Remorseless Collective Consciousness That Ruthlessly Assimilates Smaller EMS Civilizations!

Got to work yesterday and logged into the Hive Mind like a good little Borg drone, and discovered this piece of exciting news: our cardiac arrest resuscitation rate for the first quarter of 2011 was 35.29%.

That's survival to hospital discharge neurologically intact, folks, based on the Utstein reporting template. Considering that The Borg covers most of the southern half of Louisiana, a few counties in Mississippi, and a substantial chunk of territory in Texas along the I-10 corridor, and over half of our territory is considered rural…

… well, that's pretty damned good.

We're not, say, Seattle/King County Medic One or Wake County EMS rocking survival rates above 40%, but at least next time somebody talks smack about private, for-profit EMS, I can wave these numbers under his nose and say, "Oh yeah? Well, how many did your fire department save this year, Hydrant Boy?"

We're not doing anything special to get these success rates. Other than the obvious factors like response times, all we're doing is good CPR – uninterrupted chest compressions and aoviding hyperventilation. To that end, we work our codes on scene and only transport if we get ROSC, and we de-emphasized ETI to the level of post-ROSC stabilization maneuver. If you can get the tube without interrupting chest compressions, fine, but if not, the Supervisor Drones are not going to come whack you on the pee pee because you chose to use a Combitube or BVM. 

Even better, based on the data we're getting from our CODE STAT software, there's still room for improvement in the quality of CPR we're delivering. Improving that ought to help us keep those numbers, and perhaps even exceed them.
 

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