Hospitals with higher rates of survival among patients who experience in-hospital cardiac arrest also appear to have a lower incidence of in-hospital cardiac arrest, according to a study published Online First by JAMA Internal Medicine, a JAMA Network publication.
Lena M. Chen, M.D., M.S., of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and colleagues identified 102,153 cases of in-hospital cardiac arrest at 358 hospitals between January 2000 and November 2009.
The median (midpoint) hospital cardiac arrest incidence rate was 4.02 per 1,000 admissions, and the median hospital case-survival rate was 18.8 percent. In crude statistical analysis, hospitals with higher case-survival rates also had lower cardiac arrest incidence, according to the results.
"Hospitals that excelled at preventing cardiac arrests also had higher survival rates for cardiac arrest cases, and this correlation persisted after adjustment for patient case mix. We found evidence that certain hospital factors, in part, mediated this relationship, but only one of the factors we examined - a hospital's nurse-to-bed ratio - is potentially quickly modifiable," the study concludes.
Public defibrillators rarely used during cardiac arrest incidents, research shows