Findings from a tandem clinician leadership intervention for emergency department cardiac arrest care during the COVID-19 pandemic

INTRODUCTION: Cardiopulmonary arrest (CPA) care in the Emergency Department (ED) has had to be modified during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Scarce literature exists on comfort of clinicians (defined as physicians, nurses & advanced practice providers-APP's) in these new roles and their perceived understanding of new algorithms. METHODS: Routine CPA care in our ED was modified during the COVID-19 pandemic. This involved clinicians in shared leadership roles alongside COVID-19 specific changes to CPA algorithms. The new protocol was operationalized through a two-step educational intervention involving didactic education and in-situ simulations. Univariate analyses using student's t-test assessed effectiveness of this educational intervention with clinician comfort as team leaders and perceived knowledge as primary outcomes on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Subgroup analysis across physicians (attending & resident), nurses & APP's were also undertaken with an alpha of 0.05, and p values <0.05 were considered statistically significant. Secondary outcomes of task saturation, procedural safety and error prevention were also analyzed. RESULTS: Across 83 of 95 total participants, our primary outcome of clinician comfort in the team leader role improved from a mean value of 3.41 (SD: 1.23) pre-intervention to 4.11 (SD: 0.88) with a p-value <0.001 post intervention. Similar and statistically significant findings in clinician comfort were noted across all subgroups except attending physicians and APP's. Perceived knowledge increased from a mean value of 3.54 (SD: 1.06) pre-intervention to a mean value of 4.24 (SD: 0.67) with a p-value <0.001 post intervention. Similar and statistically significant findings in perceived knowledge were noted across all subgroups except APP's. Responses were registered in either the strongly agree or agree category with regards to task saturation (89%), procedural safety (93%) and error prevention (71%) across all clinicians post intervention. CONCLUSION: Our pilot investigation of the effectiveness of an educational intervention of a novel CPA protocol in the ED during the COVID-19 pandemic reached statistical significance with regards to clinician comfort in shared leadership roles and perceived knowledge. These findings suggest that the protocol is rapidly teachable, usable and can be efficiently disseminated across ED clinicians of varying experience, especially in pandemic settings. Further work regarding effectiveness of this new protocol in real life cardiac arrest scenarios is warranted.