Abstract 330: Severe Adverse Safety Events in Pediatric Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Resuscitation

Abstract

Introduction: Survival for children with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) remains poor in spite of improvements in adult OHCA survival. Hypothesis: We hypothesized that severe adverse safety events (ASEs) are common during pediatric OHCA resuscitation and that specific patterns can be identified. Methods: Retrospective cohort study of patient care reports from 51 Emergency Medical Services (EMS) agencies across the US for children less than 18 years of age with an OHCA where resuscitation was attempted by EMS providers between 2013-2019. Results: We evaluated 1,019 encounters of EMS-treated pediatric OHCA; 46% were under 12 months of age. At least one severe ASE occurred in 610 patients (60%), and 310 patients (30%) had two or more. Children under 28 days of age had the highest frequency of ASEs. The most common severe ASEs involved epinephrine administration (30%), ventilation (14%), and vascular access (19%). Logistic regression modeling found that the only factor consistently associated with severe ASEs was young age. Birth-related OHCA had 4-fold greater odds of a severe ASE compared to adolescents (95% CI 1.7-10.7) and neonates with non-birth-related OHCA had 3.2-fold greater odds of a severe ASE (95% CI 1.1-9.0). Conclusions: In this large geographically diverse cohort of children with EMS-treated OHCA, 60% experienced at least one severe ASE. The odds of a severe ASE were over 3-fold higher for neonates than adolescents, and even higher when the cardiac arrest was birth-related. Given the national increase in out of hospital births and ongoing poor outcomes of OHCA in young children, these findings are an important and urgent call to action to focus on improving care delivery and training.