Teaching basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation to schoolchildren: a three-year prospective cohort study

Abstract

Background. In Europe, about 2,500 people die of sudden cardiac attack every day. Most deaths occur on the streets, in public facilities, because none of the witnesses were able to adequately provide emergency first aid. Therefore, all groups in society should be trained in emergency first aid. Moreover, practical and social skills need to be developed in the early stages of learning, starting from school. The purpose of this work is to analyze a three-year prospective cohort study of teaching basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation to schoolchildren of Zaporizhzhia Lyceum No. 99. Materials and methods. A prospective cohort study involved 300 schoolchildren in grades 7–10 for the 2016–2019. The methodical council of Lyceum No. 99 together with the Department of Disaster Medicine and Military Medicine of Zaporizhzhia State Medical University developed and approved the work program “Basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation”; a training class with the necessary equipment was created, as well as a team of certified instructors to conduct simulation trainings with schoolchildren. The level of practical skills of schoolchildren was assessed using a protocol and checklists. Statistical analysis of data provided methods of descriptive statistics. Values that had a distribution different from normal are given as the median (lower quartile; upper quartile). Quantitative analysis was performed using the Mann-Whitney U test, qualitative binary features were compared using the χ2 test with the Yates correction, Fisher’s exact test. In all procedures, the critical significance level of p was equal to 0.05. Data processing was performed using Statistica 10.0 software package. Results. The data of the research show that the level of practical skills of schoolchildren who were trained by the program “Basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation” (5.5 hours of training) was higher (16.5 (14; 18)) that the level of practical skills of schoolchildren who were trained by classical program “Defense of the Fatherland” (60 hours of training) (8.6 (6; 10)), p = 0.001. It was also proved that there are no age and gender differences between the level of practical skills of schoolchildren in grades 7–10 who were trained by the program “Basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation” (p > 0.05). Also during the study, data were obtained that the level of practical skills of working with a training automatic external defibrillator for schoolchildren in grades 7–10 who were trained by the program “Basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation” was high (from 76.6 to 96.2 %).

Keywords

• simulation training
• emergency first aid