Fire Department Puts Pasadena’s Shockable Cardiac Arrest Survival at 57%, Far Above National Rate

The city counted 103 non-traumatic cardiac arrests last year and a bystander CPR rate of 56%

Pasadena firefighters and paramedics responded to 103 non-traumatic cardiac arrests in 2025, and among patients with a witnessed cardiac arrest and an initial shockable rhythm the city reports a 57% survival rate, according to the City of Pasadena.

Fire Chief Chad Augustin set that figure alongside rates of 35.9% in Los Angeles County, 34.7% in California and 37% nationally, and reported that 11.7% of the city’s cardiac arrest patients survive to hospital discharge neurologically intact, against 5.1%, 6.4% and 8.3% for the same three comparisons.

The city credits community training, rapid response and coordination among dispatchers, firefighters and paramedics.

The measure is the ‘Utstein comparator,’ defined by the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival as an arrest witnessed by a bystander and found in a shockable rhythm.

For arrests from January 2013 through December 2025, the registry puts national Utstein survival at 32.4% and overall non-traumatic survival at 10.2%, according to its April report; where the bystander also intervened, the national figure is 36.5%. The registry notes that only the prior calendar year’s data is fully audited.

On the neurological measure, the American Heart Association’s 2025 statistical update reported favorable neurologic survival of 8.2% and survival to hospital discharge of 10.5% for EMS-treated adult arrests in 2024. It also found that 41.7% of adult patients nationally received bystander CPR, and that bystander-witnessed arrests in which bystander CPR was started had 13.0% survival, against 7.6% for unwitnessed arrests.

The city reports that in 2025, 56% of Pasadena cardiac arrest patients received bystander CPR, compared with 43% across the benchmarks it cites.

The association’s 2024 update to the Utstein template notes that registries’ definitions of the comparator group vary slightly and that risk adjustment for patient case mix is “necessary when comparing the performance of health care services.”

The registry, created in 2004 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with Emory University School of Medicine, covered roughly 186 million residents, or 56% of the U.S. population, as of January 2025. Without uniform collection, it says, “communities cannot measure the effectiveness of their response systems.”

Two local calls last Saturday illustrate the department’s account, the city said.

Engine 37 reached the first within four minutes of dispatch and found community members already performing hands-only CPR; the patient regained pulses about ten minutes after firefighters arrived and reached the hospital neurologically intact.

In the second incident, crews at the same station witnessed a man collapse into cardiac arrest, began CPR immediately and transported him awake, alert and stable.

Hands-only CPR runs three steps: call 9-1-1, push hard and fast in the center of the chest at 100 to 120 compressions per minute, and keep going until help arrives. Brain damage can begin after four to six minutes without oxygen.