[Effectiveness of retraining after basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation courses: a literature review]

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is one of the compulsory skills for health care professionals. Health professionals (and lay people) are offered CPR courses to learn this skill that may be implemented after a long time. Is a course enough to learn and retain this skill? Are retraining courses effective? And after how long should retraining courses be offered? These are some of the questions that guided the search of the literature. Three database were searched (medline, cinahl and healthstar) with the key-words cardiopulmonary resuscitation, retention skills, psychomotor performance, refresh course and retraining and the references of the articles were manually searched to identify further articles. After the exclusion of the articles on pediatric and advanced resuscitation and whose objective was the evaluation of the effectiveness of teaching methods 8 studies were finally identified. No clear indications are proposed. Resuscitations skills deteriorate quickly and theoretical knowledge is retained longer than practical skills. The retraining should be offered frequently but no time intervals are proposed. The main suggestion is that no standard approach should be adopted and the learning needs and preferences of the learner should be considered.