Assessment of knowledge and skills about basic life support among nurses in one referral Hospital in Rwanda: a theoretical approach

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.