European Resuscitation Council Guidelines 2025 Executive Summary

Abstract

The 2025 European Resuscitation Council (ERC) Guidelines present the most up-to-date evidence-based guidelines for the practice of resuscitation across Europe. The ERC Guidelines 2025 are based on evidence produced by the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR) in the form of systematic reviews, scoping reviews, and evidence updates, published as the ILCOR Consensus on Science with Treatment Recommendations. The certainty of evidence of these ILCOR treatment recommendations was used to issue the ERC Guidelines 2025 Recommendations. In some cases, the ERC made good practice statements when evidence was absent for certain topics. If no ILCOR review was available, the ERC writing groups conducted their own reviews to provide recommendations. The ERC Guidelines 2025 cover the epidemiology of cardiac arrest, the role that systems play in saving lives, adult basic life support, adult advanced life support, resuscitation in special circumstances, post resuscitation care, newborn resuscitation and support of transition of infants at birth, paediatric basic and advanced life support, resuscitation ethics, education for resuscitation, and first aid. These guidelines are a framework of recommendations for the approach to out-of-hospital and in-hospital resuscitation; the implementation is achieved locally taking local legislation and health care regulations into consideration.