A Novel, 5-Minute, Multisensory Training Session to Teach High-Quality Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation to the Public: Alive in Five.

Abstract

Nearly 350 000 people in the United States have out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) each year.1 Initiation of bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) improves survival after OHCA; however, there is significant geographic variation in the rates of both bystander CPR and OHCA survival in the United States, as much as 5-fold.2 The disparate geographic survival from OHCA was deemed unacceptable by the Institute of Medicine, prompting a call for strategic efforts to educate and train the public in CPR.2 In response, the American Heart Association set the goal to increase the rate of bystander CPR nationally from 31% to 62% of cardiac arrests by 2020.3 Rates of CPR training in the United States are low (median 2.4% of population) and vary by community, with low-income, rural, and minority communities having disproportionately low rates of CPR training.4 The Institute of Medicine identified this low rate of training as a critical barrier to performance of bystander CPR, recognizing that “initiatives designed to increase bystander CPR must overcome existing barriers… and teach the technical skills necessary to perform CPR with confidence.”2 Traditional 4-hour CPR training is costly in terms of time and money, limiting the number of bystanders who are able to be trained by this method. Despite development of alternative CPR training methods, nationwide rates of both CPR training and bystander-initiated CPR remain low. No true gold standard exists for training the public in CPR that is efficient, effective, and leads to retention of CPR skills. The goal of this innovation was to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of public CPR training by creating and implementing a novel, brief, multisensory CPR training method, which we call Alive in Five. In Jefferson County, Kentucky, the rate of bystander CPR in 2015 was 15.4%, below the national average of 31%; additionally, …