New South Wales intensive care ambulance system: outcome of patients with ventricular fibrillation.

Four hundred and thirty-four (2%) of the 22210 patients transported by the Intensive Care Ambulance system in Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong during 1979, were patients with ventricular fibrillation (VF). Two hundred and eighty-two (65%) of these were pronounced dead on arrival in hospital, 152 (35%) were admitted to hospital, and 91 (21%) survivors were discharged from hospital. For 240 patients with witnessed cardiac arrest, the mean delay before the arrival of the paramedics was 15.9 +/- 3.1 SE minutes. Only one of 41 patients attended by paramedics later than 10 minutes after cardiac arrest survived to be discharged from hospital, compared with 39 of 169 patients attended by paramedics within 10 minutes of cardiac arrest. With the assistance of the Intensive Care Ambulance, 91 patients survived pre-hospital VF in New South Wales in 1979; consideration should be given to methods of minimising delays in attending these patients.