Time perception collapses in a resuscitation. Two minutes of compressions feels like five to the person doing them and like thirty seconds to the person running the arrest, and the gap between those two estimates is where rhythm checks drift, adrenaline doses bunch or stretch, and the decision to stop gets made on a feeling rather than on an elapsed interval.
So make time audible. Assign one person to call the clock out loud — 'two minutes, rhythm check next', 'that's eight minutes down, third adrenaline given at six' — rather than leaving it to a display nobody is looking at. It costs a person who is often standing at the edge anyway, and it converts the running commentary in the team leader's head into something the whole room shares and can correct.
The same habit does the work at handover. A team that has been calling the clock can say what happened and when; a team that has not will report a sequence without intervals, which is the version that cannot be audited and cannot be learned from.
- Assign a named timekeeper at the start of every resuscitation
- Call intervals aloud, including what is due next
- State drug times as they happen, not from memory at the end
- Carry the timeline into handover with intervals attached
Why it matters
Every person in the room is estimating elapsed time differently, and no one is checking.
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