Epidemiology of cardiac arrest outside and inside hospital - Experiences from registries in Sweden

Cardiac arrest is a dramatic condition leading to sudden death if someone cannot perform two interventions, basic life support and early defibrillation, that have been proved to improve long-term survival. The ‘Utstein style', recently introduced, represents a standard of practice both inside and outside hospital with recommended guidelines for the uniform reporting of clinical data from the patient suffering cardiac arrest. In Sweden the vast majority of patients suffering from cardiac arrest regardless whether inside or outside hospital are included in webbased national registers (one for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) and one for in-hospital-cardiac arrest (IHCA)). In this article we will present our experiences from OHCA and IHCA separately.