Last year Slovenia (in 2022) finally got its' own registry of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest registry. But it wasn’t a new idea and it was only for three months…
Initial push came in form of Written declaration on establishing a European cardiac arrest awareness week by the European parliament in 2012. They recognized the incredible health burden that cardiac arrest represents to our healthcare and everyday life. Along other initiatives European parliament urged the European Commission and the Council of EU to encourage systematic data collection for feedback and quality management in every national programme for AED implementation.
First time (at least known to us) that national OHCA registry was proposed in Slovenia was in 2016 when the president of Extended professional board of Emergency medicine presented the idea of the registry to the Slovenian society for emergency medicine. She encouraged them to decide what data should be gathered and how the registry should operate. Their motion was supposed to be included in the legislation as a part of Healthcare Databases Act.
Slovenian reanimation council of Slovenian society for emergency medicine responded after few months with their idea that loosely correlated with Utstein-style guidelines. They suggested gathering the following data: time of cardiac arrest, call time, team departure time, the time of the team's first contact with the patient, time of the first defibrillation, first monitored rhythm, type of airway control, type of vascular access, ROSC (yes/no), time of ROSC, use of therapeutic hypothermia in hospital, 30-day survival or survival to discharge, neurological outcome at hospital discharge.
In 2019 the team held a meeting, where they discovered that the data collection for OHCA would be possible if they were to determine the content of the register, establish information systems and provide funding. The National Institute for Public Health (NIJZ) 44 register was chosen as the legal basis, and it was decided that the NIJZ would investigate whether this data could be linked to hospital data.
This is why with SiOHCA we want to push things forward and make this data collection a reality 💫