Abstract 198: Public Perceptions on Why Women Receive Less Bystander CPR Than Men in Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest

Abstract

Introduction: Women who suffer an out of hospital cardiac arrest have been observed to receive less bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) than men. Potential reasons for why women receive less bystander CPR than men are largely unknown. Methods: Mechanical Turk (MTurk), Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform, was used to pilot a national survey asking participants why they believe women receive less bystander CPR than men. Eligible participants were adults (18 years or over) located in the US. Participants were reimbursed $1 for their participation. To ensure adequate knowledge on the subject, survey responses were excluded if they incorrectly defined CPR. Participant demographics as well as familiarity with CPR were queried. Participants were asked to answer the following free-text question “Do you have any ideas on why women may be less likely to receive CPR than men when they collapse in public?” Descriptive statistics were used to define the cohort. The free text response was coded using thematic analysis and major themes were identified via classical content analysis. Results: Within 55 minutes of deploying the pilot survey, 54 individuals responded. All respondents answered the knowledge question correctly, and none were excluded. Mean age was 36.9 ±9.6 years and 38.9% were female. Participants were geographically distributed as follows: 13% West, 13% Southwest, 16.7% Midwest, 27.8% Southeast, 29.6% Northeast. Predominant themes identified for why women might receive less bystander CPR than men are identified in Table 1. Within this cohort, 27.8% were trained in CPR, and only 5.6% of respondents had actually performed CPR on a person. Conclusions: In this pilot survey, public perceptions identified social norms regarding fear of inappropriate touching and hurting women as significant contributors to reasons for why women receive less bystander CPR than men. Additional work using a larger national sample to confirm and expand on these findings is ongoing.