Paramedic Papers Daily — 2 November 2026

One paper today.

Paper one — the International Journal of Nursing Studies Advances. A modified Delphi consensus study, run in the United Kingdom with international representation on the panel. One hundred and four participants registered — doctors, advanced practitioners, paramedics, nurses and academics. They set out to build a consensus-based quality metric for bystander CPR in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, because there's no standardised tool for measuring it right now. Eleven criteria reached consensus, at seventy-five per cent agreement or better. The mechanical ones you'd expect — chest compression rate, depth and recoil — plus contextual factors: dispatcher instruction, time from recognition to the emergency call, and AED use. Every criterion scores dichotomously — done or not done — and two composite indicators were created to streamline overlapping elements.

Why it matters — bystander CPR quality drives survival, yet registries and researchers have been measuring it inconsistently. A shared metric would let out-of-hospital cardiac arrest data here in Australia and overseas speak the same language, and it puts system factors like dispatcher instruction on the same footing as compression depth.

The caveats — this is a provisional metric. It hasn't been validated yet, so it's context rather than practice change. And attrition was heavy — only eighteen panellists made it to the final consensus round.

Quick recap. One — a UK-led Delphi panel agreed on eleven indicators for measuring bystander CPR quality, from compression mechanics through to dispatcher instruction and AED use, though the metric still needs validating.

That's the roundup for Monday the second of November. Papers on the dashboard. Back tomorrow.