Abstract
According to current European Resuscitation Council guidelines, priorities in advanced life support in adult are chest compression with minimal interruption and early defibrillation. Endotracheal intubation is still considered the gold standard in airway management, but guidelines suggest that securing the airway be incremental, ranging from basic techniques to more complex ones. Doctors who work in pre-hospital emergency medicine teams (EMT) in Croatia usually lack sufficient education and expertise. The aim of this study was to determine whether there was a significant difference in recovery of spontaneous circulation during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in out-of-hospital setting depending on the EMT airway management technique of choice. This retrospective analysis included data collected during a 10-year period at the Krapina-Zagorje County Emergency Medicine Institute on all patients with CPR performed by EMTs 20 minutes from initial emergency call. The airway management groups included oropharyngeal tube, i-gel supraglottic device, and endotracheal tube. There were 968 patients, mean age 70. In 74.61% of patients, the cause of arrest was of cardiac etiology. Our study did not find a statistically significant in difference of CPR success among the three groups analyzed according to the airway management technique of choice (p=0.74, χ2-test).