A bit about yourself…how long have you been involved in NCAA?
I have been working as a Resuscitation Officer for three years. I began supporting NCAA by collecting data and in the last 18 months I have also helped with the collection and validation processes, for Birmingham Heartland’s Hospital, Good Hope Hospital and Solihull Hospital.
You are currently managing the NCAA data collection and validation for three hospitals. Can you give us some details on how you and your team work to stay on top of your data collection/validation?
Every morning a member of our resuscitation service follows up on the 2222 calls. We take a look at the call logs recorded by switchboard the previous day. We then follow up the calls using data collected by our outreach team, and if needed visit the necessary areas to follow up patients.
What have you found the most useful benefit of taking part in NCAA?
The data analyses found in the NCAA reports are good indicator on how well we are doing. It allows us to monitor our performances across our hospitals and maintain a good standard of practice.
Our hospital is also a pilot site for ReSPECT, a new process introduced by the Resuscitation Council. The NCAA data/reports allow us to ensure that we are not seeing an increase in inappropriate resuscitation attempts.
“ReSPECT is a process that creates personalised recommendations for a person’s clinical care in a future emergency in which they are unable to make or express choices. It provides health and care professionals responding to that emergency with a summary of recommendations to help them to make immediate decisions about that person’s care and treatment. ReSPECT can be complementary to a wider process of advance/anticipatory care planning.”(1)
(1) http://www.respectprocess.org.uk/
Finally…do you have any tips for all other NCAA participants?
Provide as much support as you can to the various teams involved with data collection e.g. the switchboard and outreach teams.
A big thank you to Luke for taking the time to be interviewed!
If you’d like to be interviewed for our e-bulletin please get in touch: ncaa@icnarc.org