Knowledge of basic life support among Medical and Dental students: A comparative study

Basic life support (BLS) is the medical procedures and skills which are used to save the victim from life-threatening emergencies until medical care is provided at the hospital. BLS procedures include cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), bleeding control, artiﬁcial ventilation and basic airway management . Fatal medical emergencies may occur at any time. However, there are no set standards introduced in India to date. These life-saving maneuvers can be given through the structured resuscitation programs, which are lacking in the academic curriculum. The present study assessed the level of awareness toward basic life support (BLS) among medical and dental students . A cross-sectional study was carried out among dental and medical students in 2019. The study participants were people of the age group between 18-25 years. A convenient sample size of 250 was studied. A total of 250 subjects of age groups 18-25 years were analyzed in the study. The majority of students were not aware of BLS, with medical students fairing slightly better than dental students. The present study demonstrates poor knowledge among medical and dental students regarding BLS and showed the urgent need for continuous refreshing courses for this critical topic.


Introduction
Life-threatening emergencies can occur anytime and anywhere. The lack of coaching and incompetence to handle these emergencies can have tragic consequences. Basic resuscitation skills, includ-ing prompt and effective CPR (CPR), increases the survival rate following cardiac arrest. Theoretical knowledge with practical demonstrations and regular practice with up-to-date recommendations is vital in maintaining the potential https://ijpccr.com/ of basic life support (BLS) and advanced life support (ALS) providers. (1) Saving people's lives involves a sequence of steps that constitute the chain of survival. This includes four stages (2) : • Early approach to a cohesive medical emergency • Early initiation of BLS • Early defibrillation • ALS Sudden cardiac arrest is the most common cause of death worldwide with a large variation in survival rates between different communities. (3,4) Early detection of cardiac arrest and initiation of CPR has been shown to decrease mortality and morbidity. (4)(5)(6) In recent years several publications have highlighted the deficiencies in CPR quality, both out-of-hospital and inhospital, which have partly been addressed in the newest BLS guidelines. (7,8) Individuals in the community at least the health professionals should know how to perform BLS as they encounter such situations very often. This study was aimed to explore the level of knowledge towards BLS among medical, dental students in BMCH, Chitradurga.

Study type
Cross-sectional study

Sample size
All undergraduate students studying in the dental and medical college of BMCH, Chitradurga.

Study duration
3 months (April to September 2019)

Sampling method
Convenient sampling method of all medical and dental students of BMCH, Chitradurga.

Study population
Undergraduate students studying in medical and dental college BMCH, Chitradurga.

Study tool
The self-administered, semi-structured, pretested questionnaires were used. A Questionnaire was prepared to encompass 2 main domains: 1. Demography and professional qualification of the participant 2. Theoretical and practical knowledge of the participants related to BLS (20 MCQ's

Inclusion criteria
Undergraduate students studying in the medical and dental college of BMCH, Chitradurga.

Exclusion criteria
• Students not available or absent • Students who do not give consent Data collection. The students were approached in their lecture halls and recruited for the study. A total of 150 medical undergraduate students and 100 dental undergraduate students were sampled. The purpose of the study was explained to the respondents and their verbal and written consents to participate in the study were sought and obtained before the questionnaires were administered. The confidentiality of the participants was guaranteed, and they were informed that the data will be analysed at a group level in order to de-identify the participants.
Data analysis. The collected data were calculated with MS Excel and then statistical analysis was made by statistical package for social science (SPSS) 20 version. Qualitative data were presented in frequencies and percentages. Quantitative data were presented in means and standard deviation. Chisquare test was applied as a test of significance for qualitative data and t-test/ANOVA test was a test of significance for quantitative data. The level of significance was set at p value <0.05.

Results
In our study, among 250 subjects mean age was 19.79 years with S.D.1.4 and the majority were females (63.6%) Overall, the respondents showed a poor level of knowledge with respect to first response in an emergency; the proportion of correct answers varied greatly, with significant differences between MBBS and BDS and data shown in Table 1. Table 2 Shows the knowledge of study participants about CPR in adults and neonates/infants/children. It is clear that, both MBBS and BDS students have very poor knowledge about CPR.

Discussion
The present study was done to understand the awareness of BLS among medical and dental students. Among 250 subjects, 60% belong to MBBS and 40% from BDS. A study using a similar questionnaire by S Chandrasekaran et al. (9) was conducted among 1054 participants in Tamil Nadu. Table 5 shows a detailed comparison of the two studies. The participants displayed poor knowledge in our study as well as in similar studies conducted by Chandrasekaran et al. (9) , Srinivas et al. (10) , Sudeep et al. (11) , Aroor et al. (12) , Zaheer et al. (13) and Alanazi et al. (14) .

Conclusion
From our study, we conclude that lack of awareness regarding BLS among medical and dental students is a serious issue that needs to be addressed promptly. BLS and other resuscitation skills should be part of the undergraduate curriculum and students should master the skills during their studies. More research is warranted in our setup also involving other medical personnel and to determine an appropriate and efficient course design.