Knowledge about basic life support (BLS)‎ among health care workers in Dhamar, Yemen

Abstract EN

Objective : appropriate BLS is crucial for outcomes of sudden cardiac arrest and traumatic cases.

This study aimed at evaluation of knowledge of BLS among health care workers in Dhamar governerate, Yemen.

methods: a 6-month multi-centre cross sectional study was conducted and included 149 health care workers.

data were collected through a questionnaire, which is according to current american heart association (AHA)/european resuscitation council (ERC) guidelines of 2015.

This self-explantory questionnaire of 24 questions was designed to assess and compare the knowledge of BLS by the participants and consisted of two main domains: demography (composed of 4 questions) and knowledge of BLS (composed of 20 questions).

comparisons of the characteristics of demographic domains-gender, qualification and previous training in BLS in terms of the mean score of knowledge were considered, and statisticaly tested by independent-samples t-tests post Leven’s tests.

results : of the 149 respondents, 97 had BLS knowledge score of at least 50% mark, corresponding to adequate knowledge about BLS and 52 had BLS knowledge score of less than 50% mark, corresponding to inadequate knowledge about BLS.

the total mean score of BLS knowledge were 53.12 in the setting of range of 0-100 with standard deviation of 15.58.

Statistically, the mean score among males and females participants was found to be insignificantly different, as was the mean score among participants who had ever had prevoius training in BLS and those who had never had any previous training in BLS.

On the other hand, the mean score in participants who belong to medicine field was significantly higher than that in participants who belong to nursing field.

conclusions : prevalence of programmed BLS courses was low among health care workers.

Moreover, there was no inadequate knowledge about BLS.

Therefore, a high-quality strict accreditation program of BLS to the undergraduate curriculum and structured training of BLS for health care workers, along with regular reassessments throughout the career of the health professionals is recommended.