Physician presence at out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is not necessarily the cause of improved survival

Abstract

A recent publication Hiltunen et al. on Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest (OHCA) in Finland show increased survival when a physician attends an OHCA, compared to EMS. But it is likely that physicians attend OHCA patients with a different prognosis due to comorbidity or illness severity, which causes confounding by indication and is the likely cause for the physician and survival association.