Study design
This was a cross-sectional multicenter study. Hospitals were selected by
random sampling in 6 administrative regions separately. In China,
Hospitals are classified by the National Health and Family Planning
Commission of the People’s Republic of China as follows: Level III
hospitals refer to medical centers or tertiary hospitals that have
independent emergency departments (EDs) and are also teaching hospitals;
Level II hospitals are regional hospitals which have independent EDs but
are not teaching hospitals; and Level I hospitals, also called community
hospitals, do not have EDs. Only level III hospitals were selected in an
attempt to target providers likely to care for CA patients. First of all
we screened all level III hospitals in one administrative region. The
hospitals were coded randomly by SPSS and then were arranged in
ascending order in each administrative region. Top 20% hospitals were
enrolled in the study. The alternative hospitals were considered if the
hospital was inaccessible or refused to participate (in ascending
order). Finally 75 hospitals were included. The distribution of
hospitals was shown in figure 1. Then we conducted a questionnaire
survey for all emergency physicians of selected hospitals. Informed
consent was obtained from all participants.
The questionnaire was developed by a senior emergency physician and
discussed 3 times by an expert team which consists of emergency
specialists experienced in the management of resuscitated patients,
neurologists, and epidemiologist, working on rephrasing and improvement.
Briefly, the questionnaire includes three parts: (1) Background data of
the respondent; (2) The awareness of neurological prognosis (3) The
practice of neurological evaluation. The questionnaires were distributed
to the respondents from January to March 2018. Data collection ended in
July 2018. The study protocol was approved by Peking university third
hospital.