Resuscitation in Europe: a tale of five European regions

Aim: To describe cardiac arrest data from five emergency medical services ( EMS) systems in Europe with regard to survival from an out-of-hospital card iac arrest. Methods: Based on recommendations from various countries in Eur ope EMS systems were approached with regard to survival from out-of-hospita l cardiac arrest. Five EMS systems were asked to report their cardiac arres t data according to the Utstein style. Results: The five selected EMS syste ms were: Bonn (Germany), Gottingen (Germany), Helsinki (Finland), Reykjavik (Iceland) and Stavanger (Norway). For patients with a bystander witnessed arrest of cardiac aetiology the percentage of patients being discharged ali ve from hospital in these regions were: 21, 33, 23, 23 and 35. The correspo nding percentages for patients fulfilling criteria as above and being found in ventricular fibrillation were: 32, 42, 32, 27 and 55. Conclusions: Many EMS systems in Europe show extremely good results in terms of survival aft er an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Some of the results should be interpr eted with caution since they were based on relatively small sample sizes. F urthermore, the results from one of the regions (Stavanger) was unit based and not community based. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.