Efforts to Promote the Comprehension of and Motivation for the Practice of Basic Life Support for Infants: A Novel Strategy for Pharmaceutical Education / 社会薬学

ABSTRACT

The mortality rate of pediatric out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is more than 80% in Japan, which is markedly higher than that in adults. Basic life support (BLS) by bystanders is essential for preventing sudden cardiac death. In the model core curriculum for pharmaceutical education in 2024, students must acquire the ability to ensure public health. As part of our educational policy, pharmacy students provide a workshop on infant BLS. This workshop is incorporated after the PUSH course, an authorized training program for BLS focused on chest compressions and AED use of people over elementary school age, for convenience. We herein investigated whether infant BLS training promoted the comprehension of and motivation to perform BLS for infants and assessed the educational relevance of pharmacy students serving as instructors of the BLS training course. Questionnaire responses were obtained from participants before and after the workshop. The majority of participants were college students and childcare workers. Knowledge of infant BLS by childcare workers was significantly more extensive than that by the other participants; however, overall understanding of infant BLS and the motivation to contribute to it increased irrespective of participant backgrounds. Overall improvement was also observed in the items necessary to implement BLS excluding artificial ventilation even though the instructions were given only by pharmacy students. The present results demonstrate that infant BLS training effectively enhanced public motivation to perform BLS for infants with cardiac arrest.