Cardiac arrest prevention

Thanks to generous donations to our Help A Heart Appeal, our charity was able to fund a special cardiac arrest prevention project called CAP QI which saw a reduction in the number of cardiac arrests on our Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU).

Our PICU is the largest and busiest single-centre PICU in the UK and caters for 35 specialties, including cardiac. Of all the unit’s heart patients, around 25% are deemed at high risk of having a cardiac arrest.  

The number of children who survive a cardiac arrest in hospital is only 54%, and those that do often experience additional health complications as a result, which can impact their life expectancy and quality.  

Our Help A Heart Appeal raised £50,000 to fund a quality research nurse on PICU, who brought in special measures to help us lower the chance of our heart patients arresting, including:     

• Helping to identify our most at-risk patients 
• Introducing and increasing measures to reduce the possibility of a cardiac arrest happening
• Ensuring nurses caring for patients at the bedside are prepared for high-risk patients
• Educating staff, so if a cardiac arrest does happen, they feel ready to respond in a safe and efficient way
• Collecting quality data to measure the role’s success.  

We are the first paediatric hospital in the UK to implement such a role and saw a 40 per cent reduction in cardiac arrests, equating to one cardiac arrest less per month, compared to the year before the new measures were introduced. The same project conducted across 15 hospitals in America was found to reduce cardiac arrests by 33%.