The Borg: Remorselessly Resuscitating More People Than Ever

Just got the word from Headquarters Hive that, through the efforts of my fellow drones and I, our cardiac arrest resuscitation rate for 2011 was 27.48%. For the third quarter of 2011, our resuscitation rate was 34.78%. In 2005, when we started tracking it, our resuscitation rate was only 8.2%.

Of course, that's only for witnessed VF arrest, but those are the same measures used by those systems that tout resuscitation rates over 50%. That means that over 1 of 4 of our VF patients were discharged from the hospital neurologically intact or only mildly impaired.

Not too shabby, considering that we cover 58 counties/parishes in Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, with over 250 ground ambulances in service at any one time. And most of our service area is rural or suburban.

There's nothing mystical about what we're doing, either – no special drug regimens, no mechanical CPR devices, no whiz-bang airways, no six-man CPR pit crews. We simply emphasize uninterrupted chest compressions.

To that end, we deemphasize advanced airway access until later in the resuscitation (if at all) and only if we can do it without interrupting compressions, and we work our codes on scene, because packaging for transport results in too many interruptions, and chest compressions in a moving ambulance suck.

I'd say "good job" to my fellow drones, but that praise has already spread through the Hive Mind already.