Skills for Health and the Resuscitation Council UK have partnered to provide the NHS with life-saving digital resuscitation training.
The ‘National Cardiac Arrest Audit 2019/20’¹ reported 13,211 in-hospital cardiac arrests in NHS acute hospitals. Just over half (51.4%) survived the event, and around a quarter (24%) survived to discharge. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) vastly increases patient survival of cardiovascular arrests and reduces in-hospital mortality when provided promptly and effectively from adequately trained healthcare professionals. The quality of this training has a clear impact on the efficiency of CPR and consequently on health outcomes.
Given the importance of CPR in delivering effective care and protecting human life, resuscitation training is understandably a mandatory module for all UK healthcare staff, as outlined in the Core Skills Training Framework (CSTF) developed by Skills for Health, the Sector Skills Council for Health. These national learning outcomes, based on Resuscitation Council UK’s (RCUK) Guidelines and Quality Standards for CPR practice and training, propose the minimum frequency of refresher training or assessment as every year. However, the recommendation is also made that every healthcare organisation should determine this exact time period dependent upon role, clinical responsibilities, and local level training audits.
It has been widely evidenced that resuscitation training and competence development should be continuous for many staff groups, with numerous studies observing a significant deterioration of CPR knowledge and skills as early as three months after training. While it is crucial that learning is assessed annually in a classroom setting, a variety of training methods and approaches may be used to plan, and deliver flexibly, any required updates to training.
After the last twelve months of disruption to learning across UK hospitals, the accessibility and availability of digital resources to support the ongoing delivery of critical resuscitation training in 2021 has never been more vital.
With a shared commitment to improving patient outcomes, Skills for Health and RCUK have joined forces to deliver a new suite of specialised resuscitation eLearning for healthcare professionals: Resuscitation Level 3 – adult resuscitation, Resuscitation Level 2 – maternal resuscitation, and Resuscitation Level 2 – new-born resuscitation.
Solely designed to align with the needs of the NHS clinical workforce, these courses complement and strengthen the CSTF learning outcomes, and importantly support staff at a time when face-to-face learning is still a challenge.
This range of patient-specific courses provide the core knowledge required by healthcare professionals when managing deterioration and resuscitation. These digital courses have been written by UK leading experts in resuscitation and embed the current RCUK Resuscitation Guidelines.
Find out more here about the new resuscitation eLearning courses.
Source (1) ‘Key statistics from the National Cardiac Arrest Audit 2019/20’
