New Information and Communication Technologies (ICT´s) in Basic Life Support Training for Non-medical Students: Educational Trial

Plain-language summary

With the increase in life expectancy of the general population and advances in medicine, there is now a population with a higher amount of cardiovascular diseases that lead to an increased risk of sudden cardiac arrest. In most cases, this occurs in extra-hospital settings such as family homes, shopping centres, public transport and before people without any knowledge or training in basic life support. On the other hand, for every minute that passes without adequate attention of the victim, the probability of surviving or continuing to live with neurological severe sequelae decreases by 10%. In developed countries, public policies have been created to encourage basic life support education to the general population. In Colombia, because of the high prevalence of these diseases and the need for public health strategies, a law was issued to provide access to automatic external defibrillators (AEDs) in public places. However, it has not been developed strategies for education on this subject. For that reason, the investigators created an educational strategy of self-learning, which consists of a complete basic life support course based in new Information and Communication technologies with tools to manufacture a mannequin and a homemade DEA, which will allow continuous training, with a very low cost compared to traditional life support training. The clinical trial will compare that two educational strategies, evaluating as primary aid, which approach has higher knowledge retention of life support chain at 6 months in students after the workshop. As secondary objectives, the investigators would evaluate the efficient in terms of response times, costs and student satisfaction. This study will be carried out in high school students from two different high schools, without prior training in Life support. Both strategies will be distributed randomly. The experimental group will carry out the self-learning strategy based on ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), with which they will be retrained every month, and the control group will carry out the conventional training only once as usual. Subsequently, each of the objectives will be evaluated at six months. It is proposed that the self-learning strategy is superior compared to conventional training, requiring fewer resources to perform it and allows constant retraining, which improves retention and quality in a resuscitation process.

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