Introduction:
Although millions of healthcare providers and lay providers are trained globally in CPR each year, there are major gaps in delivering adequate medical emergency care such as poor quality CPR in the hospitals or none performance of CPR in out of hospital settings for people with cardiac arrest.
Objective
This systematic review aim to highlight the effect of training on knowledge and skills retention as well as the effect of different methods of training on knowledge and skills
Methods
The review used six online databases: Scopus, ProQuest, PubMed, ScienceDirect, CINAHL, Medline and reviewed reference citations for additional studies. Systematic analysis was use in excluding articles from the database by the latest 2015 American Heart Association (AHA) guidelines, known as Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) for the evaluation of knowledge and skills retention.
Results
A total of 71,671 possible articles were registered in six databases, with 331 articles found meeting eligibility criteria. And only 20 were finally included that met all the qualifying criteria for this systemic analysis. Most research used multi-choice questionnaires to assess retention of both knowledge and skills. From the pretest to the posttest, studies have shown that knowledge or skill rates differ and decrease from 6 weeks to 2 years after training. Between the reviewed papers, significant variations in retaining knowledge and skills were found between instructor-led training and other forms of teaching methods.
Conclusion
Between the pre-test and post-test outcomes, knowledge and skills have shown a substantial overall improvement in acquisition and retention. However, skills were observed to decay faster than knowledge. Skills start to decay as early as 2 weeks whereas knowledge retention start to decline on average between 1 month and 6 month after BLS/CPR training. Most of the articles showed that other forms of teaching methods are also as effective as the instructor led/traditional teaching methods in knowledge and skills levels among nurses. Therefore, future research should concentrate on the ideal timeline needed after initial training for the re-certification of the BLS/CPR.