Clinical trial NCT00715767: Basic Life Support (BLS) and Barriers to Cross-Cultural Education
Official title: Correlation of Cognitive and Technical Skills Assessment for Basic Life Support and Identification of Barriers to Cross-Cultural Education
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Phase: NA
Conditions: Medical Education
Keywords: BLS training
CPR
post graduate education
resource-limited settings
medical education
CPR retention
cultural barriers
Lead sponsor: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
Sponsor class: OTHER
Collaborators: name: Laerdal Medical
First posted: 2008-07-15
Enrollment: 215
Sex: ALL
Standard ages: CHILD
ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: no
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: FACTORIAL
Primary purpose: HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Brief summary: This is a randomized, multi-center intervention trial comparing two educational programs on healthcare provider performance in the Botswana national hospital system. This study addresses the critical question of how to effectively and consistently measure and associate CPR knowledge and psychomotor skills, enabling the optimization of the learners' environment.

Detailed description: Context: The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than 16 million people die from cardiovascular diseases each year, accounting for more than one-third of global deaths. Almost half of these deaths take place in hospitalized settings. Standard acute medicine education programs have had limited success in training hospital based healthcare providers to acquire, retain, and transfer knowledge and skills to impact patient outcomes in both developed and developing countries. There is a gap between the cognitive knowledge and critical thinking skills attained during courses and the technical and team skills actually performed by hospital-based healthcare providers. This gap between existing knowledge and performed skills restricts care delivery, underutilizes available resources, and contributes to the number of preventable deaths. This gap is further accentuated in resource limited settings, where barriers to implementation of successful acute medicine training programs are often accentuated.

Primary Objective:

1. To determine selected cognitive knowledge and critical thinking skills which are associated with technical and team skills performance assessed immediately following Basic Life Support (BLS) for Health Care Providers course training.

Secondary Objectives:

1. To identify cultural, healthcare environment and educational barriers that currently impede acquisition, retention, and transfer of knowledge and skills in acute medicine educational programs in resource limited settings.

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

1. Healthcare providers involved in patient contact.
2. Participation in BLS for Healthcare Provider Course

Exclusion Criteria:

1. Have received formal Basic Life Support training in previous 12 months.
2. Inability to perform or complete cognitive and skills assessment testing (pre, immediate post, 3 or six month post).
3. Healthcare personnel performing an educational rotation at the district or referral hospital will not be eligible due to loss of follow-up.

Primary outcomes:
measure: To determine selected cognitive knowledge and critical thinking skills.
timeFrame: 1 year
Secondary outcomes:
Other outcomes:
Locations:
Study officials:
affiliation: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
name: Pete Meaney, MD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References: