Resuscitation Guidelines 2005: does experienced nursing staff need training and how effective is it?

Even among health care professionals, resuscitation performance has been shown to be poor. So far, it remains unclear whether cardiac arrest staff with frequent practice in resuscitation requires training to adapt to the new International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR) guidelines of 2005. This study evaluated the need for basic life support training in nurses with emergency experience.

Nurses (N = 24) recruited from an intensive care unit self-assessed their resuscitation skills and performed a cardiac arrest scenario using a manikin. After a theoretical instruction and hands-on training followed by feedback, participants once again performed a resuscitation scenario in addition to completing posttraining self-assessments. Participating nurses considered resuscitation skills training--in particular in adapting to the new ILCOR guidelines of 2005--to be important. Pretraining data revealed performance deficits even in this sample of emergency-experienced nursing staff. Training resulted in significant improvement in ventilation volume (P < .001), rate of compressions with correct depth (P < .031) and full release (P < .001), and a reduction in total hands-off time (P < .050). Objective data were mirrored in participants' self-assessed competencies.

Results suggest that basic life support training based on the ILCOR guidelines of 2005 is necessary even in nurses with emergency experience. Training followed by the application of a feedback algorithm seems to improve short-term resuscitation performance and is well accepted by experienced nurses who work on an intensive care unit and who also comprise the inner-hospital cardiac arrest team.