Abstract
We held an “American Heart Association (AHA) Family & Friends®” CPR Course and assessed both the quality of basic life support (BLS) performed by 798 fourth-year students who were matriculated in the Faculty of Pharmacy before and after the course and investigated the usefulness and limitations of these education methods.
After training, all assessments by an AHA-certified instructor indicating significantly higher implementation rates in activation of the emergency medical service (EMS) system (Pre-training: 88.9%, Post-training: 99.6%), rescue breathing (Pre-:35.7%, Post-: 78.0%), and requested an automated external defibrillator (AED) (Pre-:75.7%, Post-:99.7%) (p<0.05).
Investigation of the mean times significantly reduced after the training (p<0.05), the mean times until activation of the EMS system (Pre-:13.5±8.7 s, Post-:9.2±28.5 s), the mean times interruption in chest compressions (Pre-:10.6±5.8 s, Post-:9.0±4.9 s) and the mean time from the arrival of the AED until the first shock (Pre-:76.5±16.5 s, Post-:54.7±8.1 s).
The BLS skills significantly improved as a result of the training. However, the implementation rate for rescue breathing was lower than that for other skills. We believe the reason for this was the fact that because learning rescue breathing skills require fewer repetitions than learning other skills, the instructor was unable to provide sufficient individual corrective instruction because of a large number of students. This suggests that future rescue breathing skills training sessions should revise their methods and number of students.
