Improving In-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Response

As a doctorally prepared, sole-provider nurse anesthetist in a rural critical access hospital, I provide continuing education for both physicians and nurses in our facility. As such, I read with great interest your recent article on improving in-hospital cardiac arrest response,¹  and was taken by your statement:

Such a finding goes a long way to support my belief that nurses trained in advanced cardiac life support in intensive care units and emergency departments are well qualified to lead a code team. I then read Gilligan et al’s article myself. They reported that nurses did, in fact, score higher on knowledge of the Hs and Ts, but the differences in overall performance scores among the 3 groups were not statistically significant. Moreover, nurses were the slowest —not fastest—at initial defibrillation, though this, too, was not statistically significant.

I applaud your introduction of a leadership dyad, and will introduce this concept...