Prognosis of cardiac arrest in home care clients and nursing home residents: A population-level retrospective cohort study

Aim: To evaluate the prognosis of 30-day survival post-cardiac arrest among patients receiving home care and nursing home residents. Methods: We conducted a population-level retrospective cohort study of community-dwelling adults (≥18 years) who received cardiac arrest care at a hospital in Ontario, Canada, between 2006 to 2018. We linked population-based health datasets using the Home Care Dataset to identify patients receiving home care and the Continuing Care Reporting System to identify nursing home residents. We included both out-of-hospital and in-hospital cardiac arrests. We determined unadjusted and adjusted associations using logistic regression after adjusting for age and sex. We converted relative measures to absolute risks. Results: Our cohort contained 86,836 individuals. Most arrests (55.5 %) occurred out-of-hospital, with 9,316 patients enrolled in home care and 2,394 residing in a nursing home. When compared to those receiving no support services, the likelihood of survival to 30-days was lower for those receiving home care (RD = -6.5; 95 %CI = -7.5 - -5.0), with similar results found within sub-groups of out-of-hospital (RD = -6.7; 95 %CI = -7.6 - -5.7) and in-hospital arrests (RD = -8.7; 95 %CI = -10.6 - -7.3). The likelihood of 30-day survival was lower for nursing home residents (RD = -7.2; 95 %CI = -9.3 - -5.3) with similar results found within sub-groups of out-of-hospital (RD = -8.6; 95 %CI = -10.6 - -5.7) and in-hospital arrests (RD = -5.0; 95 %CI = -7.8 - -2.1). Conclusion: Patients receiving home care and nursing home residents had worse overall prognoses of survival post-cardiac arrest compared to those receiving no pre-arrest support, highlighting two medically-complex groups likely to benefit from advance care planning.