Impact of COVID-19 on Basic Life Support Training Among Medical Students: An Experimental Study

Aims and objectives: Sudden cardiac death (SCD) is the most common cause of mortality worldwide. Bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) improves the victim's outcome, especially when the response time for advanced life support is prolonged. We performed a study to estimate the difference in knowledge among first-year medical students after basic life support (BLS) training (part of their foundation course) before and during the novel COVID-19 pandemic. Materials and methods: We recruited first-year medical college students (batch of 2019-20: pre-COVID group - P and batch of 2020-21: COVID-19 era group - C) who were undergoing BLS training for the first time and consented to this study. Since the training was delayed and affected by COVID-19 for the batch of 2020-21, their training duration was shorter with more usage of audiovisual aids. The difference in the change in knowledge (by a questionnaire with 10 questions of one mark each) after training by the two methods was analysed. Analysis of variance, Wilcoxon signed-rank test, Mann-Whitney U test, and chi-square tests was used as applicable to compare the groups, and p-value <0.05 was considered significant. The results are analysed by IBM SPSS version 20.0 software (SPSS Inc, Chicago, IL, USA). Results: The median (inter-quartile range) marks in group P (89 students) in the pre-test was 3 (4-2) and in the post-test was 6 (7-5) (out of 10). The corresponding marks in group C (112 students) in the pre-test were 3 (4-2) and in post-test was 7 (8-6). The knowledge improvement in group C was more with all the three changes being significant (p=0.0001). In group C, females had more improvement than males (p=0.0001). Conclusion: We found a significant increase in the improvement of the knowledge after the BLS training in group C compared to group P. In group C, the improvement was better in females (59% increase in mean marks versus 22% in males).