Variation in practice for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest treated with percutaneous coronary intervention in England and Wales.

Abstract

Objectives: We assessed the association between total center volume, operator volume, and out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) volume.

Background: Variations between OHCA PCI volume, hospital total PCI, and primary PCI volume are not well studied and are unlikely to be clinically justifiable.

Methods: Patients undergoing PCI for the acute coronary syndrome (ACS) between January 1, 2014, and March 31, 2019, in England and Wales were grouped as OHCA PCI and non-OHCA PCI. Spearman's correlation was used to determine the degree of correlation between each hospital PCI volume and OHCA PCI volume.

Results: Out of 250,088 PCI procedures undertaken for ACS, 12,016 (4.8%) were performed for OHCA, and 238,072 (95.2%) were non-OHCA PCI procedures. The OHCA PCI group were younger [mean age (SD) 63.2 (12.3) and 65.6 (12.5, p < 0.001)], less likely to be female (20.2% vs. 26.9%, p < 0.001) or Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnicity (11.5% vs. 14.8%, p < 0.001) compared to the non-OHCA PCI group. Although there was a degree of correlation between total PCI and OHCA PCI, there was wide variation for both ACS cohort (Spearman correlation R2 = 0.50) and total PCI volume (Spearman correlation R2 = 0.60). Furthermore, the correlation between primary PCI volume and OHCA PCI within centers was weak (R2 = 0.10). Similarly, wide variations between operator PCI volume and OHCA PCI volume were observed.

Conclusion: These national data demonstrate wide variation in the practice of OHCA PCI both between centers and individuals. These variations are not expected according to clinical factors and require further investigation.