“Stop the Bleed” Education Assessment Tool (SBEAT): Development and Validation

As part of the national Stop the Bleed campaign in the United States, more than a million people have received bleeding control training through the work of many organizations. These public and professional educational experiences are ideally grounded in health sciences, clinical, and educational evidence to be most effective. However, there is currently no standard tool for evaluating the educational quality of these programs. We developed and validated the Stop the Bleed Education Assessment Tool (SBEAT) to provide a standard measure of life-threatening bleeding educational programs knowledge learning outcomes to aid in evaluation and development of this public health program. The SBEAT development included medical, clinical, and educational experts to derive and validate learning outcomes. Specific item writing incorporated focus groups for input on language and then pilot testing before a full community pilot test established a data set, for which a Rasch methodology was applied. The resulting tool used 34 items embedded in 19 survey questions, with item separation statistic of 5.56 (0.97 reliability) and person separation statistic of 2.09 (0.81 reliability) for 171 persons. Overall, the Cronbach Alpha (KR-20) person score “test reliability” equaled 0.85 (SEM = 2.24). The SBEAT project establishes a standardized assessment tool to evaluate the cognitive aspects of first aid for life threatening bleeding. Comparison of outcomes from different teaching styles and methods will allow for the development of best practices for future bleeding control education and help organizations demonstrate value to learners, funders, and policy makers, and advance health sciences education. SBEAT offers a measure for which educational efficiency and efficacy can be judged within a larger effort to prepare people for personal emergencies or large-scale disasters.