Data access has been approved for a project aiming to identify gaps in the care of patients who experience an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, in order to improve long-term health outcomes.
The project is being led by Dr. Christopher Fordyce, Clinical Assistant Professor within the Division of Cardiology at the University of British Columbia, and is funded by Vancouver General Hospital’s Division of Cardiology Research Fund.
Out of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) occurs in more than 400,000 North Americans each year, including more than 40,000 Canadians. Unfortunately, overall rates of survival to hospital discharge amongst survivors of OHCA remain poor. Furthermore, of the approximate 40% who arrive to hospital following successful in-field resuscitation, fewer than 1 in 4 patients subsequently survive their index hospitalization.
“The crucial first steps are to understand how frequently OHCA occurs in BC, identify gaps that may exist in the care that is provided, and determine their association with patients' long term well being,” says Dr. Fordyce. “Our findings will help improve how cardiac arrest is managed by emergency first responders in the field, by health care providers within the hospitals, and by patients and caregivers once discharged home. This project, with the proposed data linkages, represents the most comprehensive evaluation of OHCA to date.”
For the project PopData will link data sets from the BC Ministry of Health, BC Vital Statistics Agency and the Residential Assessment Instrument (RAI) with detailed information on pre-hospital processes of care (BC ROC database) with in-hospital and long term outcomes derived from the Cardiac Services BC HEART Information System (HEARTis).
The linkage of these datasets, describing the entire journey of the OHCA patient (including pre-, intra- and post-discharge processes and outcomes), will be among the most detailed OHCA data ever studied.
