Usefulness of specialized regional cardiac arrest centers

Should we organize specialized regional cardiac arrest centers?

Bernd W. Böttiger: We have very clear signals from different registries and trials that patients following out-of-hospital cardiac arrest should be transported to a center where percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) facilities are working 7 days a week and 24 hours a day. PCI is indicated in many of these patients, and besides that we do recommend temperature management, adequate prognostication, and also a specific caseload per year with cardiac arrest patients, because all of this is associated with an improvement in outcome. If you have a hospital which is professionally doing all these different things, we should call it a cardiac arrest center. Therefore, in the new guidelines we recommend this kind of hospitals where a professional approach is brought towards the out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients and we call these centers cardiac arrest centers.

So, to answer your question, yes, we should have regional hospitals, specialized hospitals, where we can bring our cardiac arrest patients from the out-of-hospital setting.