Perioperative cardiac arrest: teamwork and management

Perioperative cardiac arrest is an unfortunate event that can have disastrous outcomes if not attended and intervened on time. Arrests occurring intraoperatively have usually good outcomes as the patient is continuously monitored and it is easy to find out the cause of cardiac arrest. Patients coming for emergency surgeries, advanced ASA physical status, extremes of age groups [geriatric, pediatric] are the candidates in which perioperative cardiac arrest occurs. Events precipitating cardiac arrests should be identified early in wards. However once an arrest occurs in wards, the overall outcome depends on the timing, efforts of the resuscitation team and the events leading to cardiac arrest