Resuscitation is a highly established program of research at Providence Healthcare.

In 2005, BC resuscitation researchers partnered with BC Emergency Health Services (BCEHS) to lead one of ten North American research centers under the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (ROC) that focused on out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and trauma. Through this collaboration, the BC Resuscitation Research Unit was created, led by Dr. Jim Christenson and housed within Providence Research’s Emergency Medicine Program at St. Paul’s Hospital. Over the next decade, affiliated researchers performed numerous interventional clinical trials, observational analyses, and quality improvement initiatives to identify and study consecutive out-of-hospital cardiac arrest cases in urban BC. The BC Cardiac Arrest Registry was created in 2015 to capture data for out-of-hospital cardiac arrests responded to by BCEHS and Fire Department first responders in BC’s metropolitan regions. In 2016, the unit joined 3 other provinces to create the Canadian Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium (CanROC) national cardiac arrest registry. CanROC has grown to include most provinces as a national registry of sudden unexpected death, in partnership with the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. It supports quality improvement and research, and BC continues to play a lead role. As a result of this active focus on the quality and outcomes of resuscitation, the likelihood of survival in BC from an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest significantly increased. In 2020, the unit spearheaded “CanSAVE”, a national research collaborative to transform the response to cardiac arrest beyond traditional emergency response models and improve survival through world class resuscitation research. 

In 2021, the resuscitation research unit formally became the BC Resuscitation Research Collaborative (RESURECT). Under the shared leadership of Dr. Jim Christenson and Dr. Brian Grunau, BC RESURECT continues to work on strengthening BC’s contributions to resuscitation science.