Breaking down barriers: Call-taker strategies to address caller perception of inappropriateness of cardiopulmonary resuscitation during the emergency ambulance call.

Abstract

Background: Ambulance call-takers perform the critical role of prompting callers to initiate and continue cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for patients with suspected out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA). This study aimed to identify call-taker strategies to address callers' perceptions of CPR 'inappropriateness' (perceiving the patient as dead and beyond help, or as showing signs of life).

Methods: Using a linguistic approach, we analysed 31 calls previously identified as having an inappropriateness barrier to CPR initiation or continuation. In Phase 1, we listened to call recordings and studied call transcripts to identify the strategies and linguistic features used by call-takers. Phase 2 was a discourse analysis of transcript extracts to describe how certain strategies, identified in Phase 1, were used in the caller-call-taker interactions.

Results: Call-takers used various strategies when responding to callers who considered CPR inappropriate. Call-takers rarely used a single strategy or linguistic feature in isolation, tending to use combinations of minimal tokens of alignment (e.g. caller name or encouragements statements), with deontics (including directives/commands and statements of obligation e.g. "do this for me") and provision of either context (e.g. "the ambulance is on its way") or a rationale ("he's not breathing effectively so we need to perform CPR to help him"). Most call-taker attempts were successful, with callers overcoming 71% of initiation barriers and 88% of continuation barriers.

Conclusions: Call-takers used a combination of linguistic features (minimal/symbolic tokens, deontics) and strategies (providing unscripted statements about the context or a rationale for CPR) to overcome barriers of perceived inappropriateness to CPR.