Improving Outcomes After Pediatric Cardiac Arrest

Pediatric cardiac arrest affects thousands of hospitalized children each year. Progressive heart and lung failure is a predisposing cause in the majority of these events. While cardiac arrest survival outcomes have improved over the last decade, more than half of these children will not live to hospital discharge. As brain injury complicates care in those who do survive, the burden to these children and the public's health is substantial.

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) - the medical procedure of providing chest compressions and ventilations during cardiac arrest - is life saving, and higher quality CPR is more effective at doing so. However, providing high quality care during the resuscitation of a child is difficult. Attempts to improve care through conventional training methods have not been successful; therefore, interventions to improve the quality of pediatric CPR and outcomes are needed.

The objective of this study is to determine if a novel resuscitation care improvement bundle that improved outcomes in a single center intensive care unit (ICU) efficacy study is generalizable to other pediatric institutions in a multi-center effectiveness trial. The ICU-Resuscitation (ICU-RESUS) bundle includes: 1) CPR training at the point-of-care (in the ICU rather than a classroom away from patients); and 2) interdisciplinary structured reviews of each cardiac arrest that emphasize patient-centric physiology intended to optimize intra-arrest and post-arrest care. The ICU-RESUS bundle substantially improved CPR quality and nearly doubled the number of children surviving their event during the single center efficacy trial. In this study, a multi-institutional parallel stepped-wedge hybrid cluster-randomized trial, which leverages the existing infrastructure of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)-funded Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research Network (CPCCRN), is proposed with the following aims: 1) Evaluate the effectiveness of the ICU-RESUS interventional bundle to improve outcomes of children treated for an ICU cardiac arrest; and 2) Evaluate the effectiveness of the ICU-RESUS interventional bundle to improve the quality of CPR provided by ICU healthcare providers in the population of children treated for an ICU cardiac arrest.