Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) Dissemination Study Using Nurses and Volunteers

Each year in the United States, 300,000 people suffer from Cardiac Arrest (CA), and of them there is a 90% mortality rate. Out-of-Hospital arrests in particular have a 1-5% survival to hospital discharge. High quality CPR is crucial to lowering the mortality rate and increasing survival, yet only 15-30% of out-of-hospital CA victims receive bystander CPR. Studies have shown that prompt administration of CPR dramatically improves outcomes. In a recent study from Switzerland, lay bystander CPR doubled the survival rate at one month. Our study will look to train family members of at-risk cardiac patients in the skills of CPR through the American Heart Associations (AHA) CPR Anytime Friends and Family Personal Learning Program (CPR Anytime) to see if these family members are able to learn and perform quality CPR in the event that their family member should suffer a cardiac arrest. The unique feature of the CPR Anytime training is that it is a low-cost, self-learning, video-based program that can be completed in under 30 minutes, saving the time and expense of traditional CPR training courses. While initial work has proven that teaching CPR in hospital using the VSI kit is feasible, little research has been conducted to make the program sustainable.

The long term goal of our work is to implement real world CPR training strategies that match training locales with at-risk populations, maximize resuscitation skill retention, and promote willingness to act. To accomplish this, we will empower stakeholders at UPHS hospitals to develop local implementation approaches, using either UPHS volunteers or nursing staff as VSI proctors. These stakeholders will be studied as a research subset. The VSI proctors will use the AHAs CPR Anytime kit, and will work with family members of patients at high risk for a CA to learn lifesaving CPR skills. We will use a modified AHA CPR video using the new AHA recommendations for bystanders which suggests doing chest compression only CPR. Using the original AHA video and the modified chest compression only video, we will randomize family members of patients at high risk for CA to one of these groups. The VSI proctors will also be blinded to which video these subjects will be watching. We will follow up with the family members at 1 month, 3 months, 6 months and 12 months to see if they retained their CPR knowledge and skills and to see if they had been in a situation where their CPR skills were needed and assess whether they performed their skills or not. We will also measure the number of people with whom the subjects shared their CPR Anytime kits a quantity known as the multiplier effect to determine if they had shared the CPR Anytime kit with their family and friends, thereby increasing the possible number of lay persons trained in CPR and in turn able to perform bystander CPR if needed. We will also assess the perceptions and attitudes of the nurses and volunteers regarding this project.