Locations Affect Cardiac Arrest Outcomes

Apr 15, 2025
Researchers from the University of Washington have published their findings showing these outcomes for people in rural areas who suffer out-of-hospital cardiac arrest:

• People in rural areas were less likely to have been resuscitated by the time they reached the emergency department than were those in poorer urban areas.
• People in economically deprived urban areas who made it to the hospital were less likely to survive, or had worse neurological outcomes, than those in urban areas that are more well-off.

UW Medicine reports that improvements in care alone won’t reduce regional differences in outcomes. “The patients were similar and appear to have received the same level of emergency care, so clinical factors may not be driving the large differences we see in outcomes,” said first author Dr. Lakota Cheek. “Our findings suggest that nonclinical factors need to be addressed to improve outcomes for these patients.”