VCURES Senior Fellow Chosen to Help Lead New NIH Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium

The National Institutes of Health's recently developed Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (ROC) has selected Senior VCURES Fellow Dr. Joseph Ornato to serve as its Co-Chair in charge of cardiac resuscitation projects. The ROC consists of 10 North American clinical trial sites in the U.S. and Canada and a Data Coordinating Center . The purpose of the consortium is to conduct multicenter outcome trials to improve survival from trauma and cardiac arrest. It is believed that the consortium will have access to over 10,000 cardiac arrest and 100,000 trauma cases a year. Dr. Ornato notes “This Consortium is the largest federal effort to conduct organized, multicenter, clinical trials research on the challenging issues relating to cardiac arrest and major trauma in the out-of-hospital setting. NIH is graciously providing $50 million to conduct this research over the next five years.”

The overall study chairman is Dr. Myron Weisfeldt who is Chairman of Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University . The co-chair in charge of trauma resuscitation projects is Col. John Holcomb who is director of research for the U.S. Army's Institute of Surgical Research .

Dr. Ornato is Professor and Chairman of VCU's Department of Emergency Medicine and medical director of Richmond 's acclaimed Richmond Ambulance Authority. He is a career researcher in emergency cardiac care and cardiac arrest. Dr. Ornato recently served as Steering Committee Chairman for a groundbreaking NIH-sponsored clinical trial on the use of public access defibrillation to improve survival from out of hospital cardiac arrest. . ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15306665 ).

The PAD trial investigators trained almost 20,000 lay rescuers in 24 US and Canadian cities to determine whether laypersons trained to use automate external defibrillators (AEDs) in addition to performing CPR could save more lives than that which could be achieved by having laypersons only perform CPR until EMS teams arrived. The results, published as the lead article in NEJM, confirmed that laypersons using AEDs on cardiac arrest victims in public places can double survival.

VCU and the city of Richmond also served as a site for this study with Dr. Mary Ann Peberdy serving as the site's principal investigator. Both Drs. Ornato and Peberdy serve in leadership roles on the American Heart Association's Emergency Cardiac Care Committee.

For more information contact Dr. Joseph Ornato at jornato@mcvh-vcu.edu