An integrated resuscitation service, combining a pre - hospital physician response unit with delivery to a dedicated high-volume cardiac arrest centre, optimises survival following cardiac arrest

Purpose & background Despite recent advances in resuscitation medicine, survival rates to discharge following out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) remain poor. Recent data support the implementation of early critical care interventions including therapeutic hypothermia (TH) and immediate percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). We describe a pre-hospital service where early delivery of critical care interventions and the capacity to transfer these unstable patients directly to a cardiac intervention centre is available through the deployment of a specialist physician response unit (PRU).