For all cardiac arrest patients, which two times should be documented?

• A. The 'scene arrival time' and 'disposition time'
• B. The 'first medication time' and 'rehabilitation time'
• C. The 'patient contact time' and 'first shock time'
• D. The 'call time' and 'ambulance start time'

Answer: (C)

In cardiac arrest care, exact time documentation tracks how quickly life-saving actions happen and how long critical events unfold. The moment you first make contact with the patient is when direct on-scene care begins, anchoring the resuscitation timeline and allowing you to measure important intervals like time to first defibrillation. Recording the first defibrillation time is crucial because early shock delivery is strongly linked to better survival in shockable rhythms and provides a clear, comparable milestone across cases.

Together, these two times capture the essential on-scene resuscitation milestones: when care starts with the patient and when the key intervention (defibrillation) occurs, enabling quality assessment and outcome analysis.

Operational times like scene arrival or disposition are useful for general records but don’t consistently reflect the resuscitation actions that most influence outcomes. First medication time can vary by protocol and may not occur in every case, and rehabilitation time isn’t a standard resuscitation metric. Call time and ambulance start time are dispatch-related and don’t directly represent the critical on-scene interventions.