A cardiac arrest occurs when someone’s heart suddenly stops beating. In the UK, around 5,500 people survive their cardiac arrest each year. For these people, life is never the same again. Long-term problems with memory, emotions, fatigue, and physical difficulties can reduce their quality of life. People are often anxious about carrying out daily activities. These changes can be upsetting for family members and co-survivors, particularly if they were present at the time of the arrest. They may also experience long-term emotional difficulties. Little is known about how best to support survivors and their family members following cardiac arrest. Some may need specialist care and support. Some survivors attend cardiac rehabilitation, but this is not designed to address the specific emotional and physical needs of a cardiac arrest survivor.

We want to develop a new programme of one-to-one education, support, and exercise rehabilitation, provided soon after returning home from hospital, to help improve the quality of life of survivors and their family members. In this study, we will develop an early support programme and assess whether it can be delivered in the NHS.

How will we do this? We will adapt an existing rehabilitation programme, originally developed for other patient groups. The new programme will be delivered face-to-face in person, or online using video-conferencing software like Microsoft Teams.

The CARESS study is supported by the active collaboration with three different teams. Each team has a distinct role in the delivery of CARESS, and these are described below.

Study Steering Committee: this is a group of 6 independent expert researchers and clinicians. One member is also a public partner. This committee meets throughout the study to provide advice and guidance to the research team.

Study Management Team: this is a team of 9 people with expertise in psychology, developing care pathways, trial methods and health. Three members are public research partners and participate as members of this team. This team meets monthly to help guide the study with its research activities.

Public Research Partners: our public partner group consists of 10 people with lived experience as cardiac arrest survivors, co-survivors or advocates. This team meets monthly and has an active role in the study as co-producers of the research activity, approaches, and analysis of study findings.

Our public partners (survivors, co-survivors and advocates) have helped us develop this study. They will continue to support all research phases.