What is the effect of volunteer community responders network on out-of-hospital cardiac arrest outcomes in the swiss canton of fribourg? a five-year retrospective observational study

The rates of CPR performed and AED usage before EMS arrival were higher in the VCR intervention group. However, the VCR intervention was not independently associated with ROSC rate, survival to hospital admission and survival to hospital discharge. Potential key explanations are the sequential manual activation of the VCR network, leading firstly to potential delays in VCR deployment and secondly to potentially more VCR deployment on home-located OHCAs or on OHCA with longer expected EMS travel time. Updating the deployment system of the emergency medical communication centre could be a key improvement measure to address this. Further studies are needed to explore these issues and to improve the chain of survival including the VCR Network.