Improving quality of life for cardiac arrest survivors

Gunilla Haydon has led Australia’s first qualitative study into the experiences of people who have survived a cardiac arrest.

A registered nurse and lecturer at the University of Newcastle (UON), Haydon explained that surviving cardiac arrest is “a major event, as there are no predictable outcomes for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR)”.

“Often survivors’ physical and psychological abilities change and adaptation to the new reality is challenging,” Haydon said.

Haydon stated that there “a lot of quantitative papers that evaluate quality of life for survivors based on standardised questionnaires, but hardly any qualitative accounts that consider individual experiences after being discharged from hospital”. And with research indicating an increase in survivors and their lifespans, Haydon felt there was a need to explore their experiences in terms of quality of life.

Conducting a literature review of several international papers, Haydon concluded that an acceptable quality of life was reported if the patient survived to hospital discharge. But while the main focus for survivors is currently on clinical outcomes such as the ability to function independently, Haydon claims that there need to be “more holistic pathways from hospital care to community care that specifically target the psychological issues that occur after surviving a cardiac arrest”.

Haydon stated that survivors often feel abandoned by the healthcare team after discharge, before a relationship has formed with the rehabilitation team. Many experience anxiety and depression, she claimed, which may be as limiting as any physical ailments.

“There needs to be a multidisciplinary approach to the transition between hospital wards and home to improve survivor outcomes,” she said.

Haydon is currently undertaking her PhD in this area, which is informed by the survivors’ narrative stories of their experience of a cardiac arrest. Articles detailing her findings have been published in the European Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing and the Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences.

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