Abstract:
Background: Cardiac arrest is among the leading cause of death globally. Health care providers
including nurses are the ones who are always with patients and the ones to discover the victims
experiencing cardiac arrest. Based on this, nurses should have basic life support knowledge and
skills in order to be able to provide quality care to those victims.
Aim: This study aimed to assess nurses‟ knowledge and skills with basic life support at the
University Teaching Hospital of Butare.
Research design and approach: A quantitative cross sectional method was used to achieve the
objectives of the present study. The data were collected by means of adapted questionnaire from
AHA; the knowledge was examined by 15 multiple choice questions and skills was examined by
10 questions. The data were analyzed with IBM SPSS version 21 and presented using tables and
charts, and where possible, the relationship between the knowledge scores and demographic
characteristics were reported.
Results: 116 nurses completed the questionnaire out of the total of 141 nurses from different
health units at the Butare Teaching Hospital namely Internal medicine, Surgery, Pediatrics,
Intensive Care and Emergency unites. The 25 out of 141 nurses did not complete the
questionnaires. The mean overall knowledge scores were very low (5.72 ± 2.466). Report on
skills show that the overall mean skills score is also very low (3.4224 ± 1.31976) of all study
participants who responded to all questions.
Conclusion: The present study reported low levels of knowledge and low level of skills on BLS
among nurses at University teaching Hospital of Butare. More in service training on BLS would
improve the situation. Assessing BLS knowledge & skills as a quasi-experimental design: pretest,
intervention and re-test after 6 months would allow the researcher to know the retention
level of knowledge and skills on BLS.
