Impact of peer sharing real-life experience during CPR training for medical undergraduates
Description
Through this experimental study, we hypothesized that a student sharing their real-life’s experience of resuscitating a cardiac arrest victim during a BLS training session would influence learning motivation and readiness to perform CPR among students resulting in better retention of the knowledge and skills among first-year medical undergraduates. We designed the present study to achieve the following objectives. • To evaluate the influence of CPR training on knowledge, skills, and attitudes among first-year medical undergraduates and assess if a pre-session assessment influences learning. • To evaluate how a near-peer sharing their real-life experience of performing CPR on a victim’ influences first-year medical students’ learning and readiness to perform CPR. • To get student feedback on the simulation session and the near-peer interaction. We used validated questionnaires to test knowledge (pre, immediate post, and delayed post-test), readiness to perform CPR, and a skill assessment checklist. The students were encouraged to provide the session feedback through open-ended questions. As the data showed a deviation from a normal distribution, we applied non-parametric tests for the statistical analysis. To evaluate how ‘the student sharing their experience’ has influenced learning, we compared the post-test scores and the responses of readiness to perform CPR between intervention groups with the non-intervention groups using Mann Whitney test. To check if the pre-testing had an influence on the post-test scores, we compared the post-test and extended-post-test between the pretested and the non-pretested groups using Mann Whitney U test. We applied the Mann-Whitney U test also to compare the knowledge post-test scores, ranks of readiness to perform CPR, and the skill evaluation scores between all the four groups. We compared the ranks for the individual responses for the readiness to perform CPR questionnaire between pre-tested groups before and after the training using Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test. We used SPSS version 21 for the statistical analysis. We also performed a thematic analysis of the feedback responses of the students. The concerns expressed by the students while performing CPR before and after the training were analyzed for frequency and represented graphically.