Abstract
Approximately 275,000 Europeans every year suffer from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) and are treated by the local Emergency Medical Systems (EMS) [1, 2]. Despite evolving evidence based guidelines for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), survival rates after OHCA have not improved much in the majority of places around the world. However, there is a huge variety in worldwide survival, with some cities having survival rates greater than 20–30 % and some with just a few percent survival [1, 2]. These significant survival differences can partly be explained by different definitions of OHCA [2], but are mainly due to overall quality within the local chain-of-survival [3] (Fig. 1, upper left panel): Early arrest recognition and call for help, early CPR, early defibrillation, and early postresuscitation care. Whereas CPR and defibrillation have received the most attention and been the major research areas over the present three decades, postresuscitation care has received more focus just in the last 10 years.
Published Version
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