Lessons learned from continuous, longitudinal phone contact with cardiac arrest survivors

Summary: We will describe our experience with longitudinal phone follow up between cardiac survivors and health care providers including overcoming survivors’ barriers to care throughout the first year after cardiac arrest.
Synopsis of Presentation: As the rate of survival from cardiac arrest increases, so have the needs of survivors. For many, there are well documented domains of need, however helping survivors navigate these domains is challenging. Particularly, most survivors do not have access to a health care team specializing in their needs.

We have developed a tiered program to assist survivors in the post hospital discharge time period. Program initiation begins with an in-person assessment prior to hospital discharge and continues via phone contact over 1 year (1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months and 12 months post hospital discharge). During this session, we will describe our program, including our novel method of using a team of specially trained research assistants, social workers, and traditional health care providers to interact with survivors to assess their needs, focusing on their emotional and physical well-being as they navigate their return to the community. We will then describe our experience with assisting survivors in obtaining outpatient resources on a statewide / regional level, including mental health support and peer support. We will discuss the need for survivors’ care coordination and transfer of care to their existing outpatient health care teams, as well as options for telephonic mental health therapeutic intervention and the continuance of collaborative telephonic assessments to identify unique individual needs. Finally, our team will facilitate a discussion amongst the session participants about their perception of survivors’ needs and whether a phone-based program seems feasible and scalable into other communities.