Abstract

BACKGROUND
Basic life support (BLS) remains an essential lifesaving skill that every healthcare provider must have. The outcome of a cardiac arrest improves significantly if it is promptly and properly instituted. Basic life support sessions are done regularly for the doctors to improve the knowledge and skills, but medical students are usually not mandated to have BLS updated regularly and so are not aware of the new guidelines. This study aimed to assess the impact of basic life support training on the knowledge of basic life support among under- graduate medical students.

METHODS
One hundred and twenty eight medical students, mostly female (n=85, 66.4%) partici- pated in this interventional study through convenience sampling. A 16-item validated questionnaire extracted from American Heart Association (AHA) guidelines was used to assess the knowledge before and after the BLS training session.

RESULTS
The pretest mean score (Standard deviation) came out to be 3.5 (±1.25) with a range of 1-6 out of a total score of 10. The post-test mean score was obtained as 6 (±1.25) with a range of 2-9. Statistically significant ( P < 0.01) difference was obtained which shows that undergraduate medical students' prior knowledge of BLS was poor which improved significantly after the commencement of the BLS training session.

CONCLUSION
This study revealed that the BLS training session significantly increased the knowledge of BLS amongst the medical students. It is therefore important that BLS training should not only be incorporated in the undergraduate curriculum of medical students but there should be multiple refresher courses on the subject to update the knowledge of BLS to be relevant and up to date.

Key words: Basic life Support (BLS), Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), Knowledge, Training