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Cardiac arrest
What actually degrades CPR performance
Contextual and perceptual challenges in cardiopulmonary resuscitation: a qualitative study
BMC Emergency Medicine · 2026-10-03 · Added 5 October 2026
Qualitative interviews with 21 resuscitation team members in Kermanshah, Iran building a model of how environmental threats, cognitive and motivational barriers, psychological stressors and socio-cultural factors interact to compromise CPR performance.
- Study type
- Qualitative
- Design
- Qualitative (conventional content analysis, COREQ-reported)
- Participants
- 21 resuscitation team members
- Main finding
- A nested four-layer model: physical and environmental threats trigger cognitive and motivational barriers, which interact with psychological and ethical stressors and extend to socio-cognitive challenges beyond the hospital
- Caveat
- Single city, ED nurses and supervisors only, and the themes were never tested against patient outcomes
- Bottom line
- Context only
Why it matters in Australia (Low relevance). In-hospital ED resuscitation teams in a very different health system — the multilevel-barriers model will feel familiar to anyone who has run an arrest, but nothing here speaks to prehospital crews specifically.
Learning goal
Understand how environmental, cognitive and team pressures degrade resuscitation performance in my prehospital practice.
More
- Topic: Cardiac arrest
- Daily scan: 5 October 2026
- Podcast: Paramedic Papers Daily, 5 October 2026
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