That hospital cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) should be supported by an organized plan rather than on the skills of individual health care personnel is a universally agreed-upon principle. Such a plan should guarantee that needed materials are available and in working order in all departments and that the team assigned to carry out CPR arrives promptly. Personnel other than the specialized team should also receive CPR training appropriate to their posts. The main features of a CPR plan are related to the five steps in the chain of survival: a) identification of a patient to be resuscitated, a matter that has important ethical ramifications; b) early recognition of cardiac arrest; c) early defibrillation; d) basic CPR, and e) advanced CPR. The CPR plan should incorporate the automatic recording of system, population, event and outcome variables. Task forces responsible for establishing and maintaining the plan and its quality control will periodically review the data with the aim of detecting errors, correcting them or introducing improvements. Various international societies and CPR committees have recently suggested a uniform way (the Utstein style) of recording and presenting data to allow comparisons either from hospital to hospital or over time within a single center.