there is nothing in an RN to BSN program that would teach nurses how to keep someone with cardiac arrest alive. How did the nurses get their BSN degrees? What about all the other factors that go into care of these patients?

another twist of the knife to older, diploma prepared RN's. I can take a hint. I will be out in 2020.

I find this maybe true in centers that after hiring a BSN have the resources to teach these RN’s the physical skills of hands on care, wondering if the same effort was made to teach theory to ASN results would be the same.
My personal experience in small community hospitals a huge amount of resources is spent training the BSN on how to do task such as IV’s and other invasive task along with task such as triage, taught in ASN programs. As for the survival rate increase these are large centers with huge resources which BSN trained RN’s are taught to delegate task in a small hospital done by the bedside RN. Wondering if if this study looked at the rural settings only these numbers would be different. Having been part of a exchange of large center and rural that BSN RN’s from this sitting lack many skills done in small rural setting. Many of my colleagues both ASN and seasoned BSN where amazed at the difference in amount of and type of knowledge required and task delegations down by the counter parts. My belief is firm education no matter how it is obtained never stops and has no correlation to the letters after ones name.
This all being said are the efforts better spent educating the ASN using certification such as CCRN, CEN etc and have physical skills at the bedside sooner then later in the rural setting or are we going to heap this task onto the hospitals as well. I can not speak for large centers as I don’t work in this environment.

I would guess that the study data were gathered from primary hospitals where patients are actually admitted to for post-arrest care

surviving to discharge with good cerebral performance

This is just a guess since we don't have the methods or anything in this summary, but that wording leads me to believe that they are not talking about ROSC specifically. I would guess criteria would exclude patient's who did not have any sort of sustained ROSC. Given that most rural/community hospitals will not be administering primary care on a post-arrest patient, I'd expect that they were excluded...

That is not to say that care is not important. Not sure if it's state by state, or standard of practice, but I know in SC a cardiac arrest was required to go to the closest hospital that could administer any post-arrest stabilization prior to transferring to a large hospital.

I have a BSN and worked at a Level I Trauma/Stroke/STEMI hospital, and I don't feel like getting my BSN was the reason I was more prepared for codes; working with experienced teams in a high acuity hospital did though. However these centers are the ones that have been hiring BSNs over Diploma/Associate nurses; Magnet status necessitates that. These hospitals are also more likely to push the RNs to get their BSN if they don't currently have it and offer support for that (like tuition reimbursement/assistance) which then can bring numbers up of very experienced RNs who then get their BSN. I feel like the BSN arguments always have some additional statistics that we could take into account for some of the results. Large hospitals have more RNs and these [new] RNs are more likely to have a BSN.

That being said, it doesn't change the fact that the degree is now associated with the outcome. Let's also not forget that this article also included patient ratio...which has long been associated with positive cardiopulmonary arrest outcomes.

You bring forward another issue and one I believe is true, education is education how one gets it is not the point as you point out as long as one moves forward and gets it. Putting and tagging out come to a degree level is a blow to many certifications like CCRN, CCT and other high level skill and knowledge specialities. This also is a stab as pointed out by earlier comments to experienced Associates degree RN’s who can’t afford the degree nor can their hospitals but they get these high level certifications which are continued education at well above many BSN material.