Introduction: Although life threatening emergencies in dental practice are not frequent, dentists have to be competent in providing basic life support (BLS).
Objectives: The aim of this work was to study the level of skills acquisition among dentistry students in two different periods of one rescuer-BLS training, a first short practice training of 2 h followed by 8 h of practice over a period of 2 months.
Methods: One hundred and sixteen second-year undergraduate students of Anesthesiology at the Dental School of the Complutense University in Madrid were tested at the end of the two periods of learning using a recording manikin with a validated scoring system (Laerdal Resusci-Anne). This manikin recorded the percentage of adequate chest compressions and insuflations, rate of chest compressions and the causes of error in each case.
Results: Final global results were, 51.66+/-3.0% adequate chest compressions; and 54.44+/-3.61% adequate insuflations. The kinds of errors where different in both tests were, wrong hand position (26.92+/-2.96 vs. 12.29+/-2.40%, P<0.001); excessive compressions (27.71+/-2.90 vs. 16.02+/-2.33%, P<0.05); and weak compressions (23.28+/-3.24 vs. 16.77+/-2.57%, P<0.05). Regression analysis found a positive correlation among excessive compression, height and weight (P<0.001) and a negative correlation between weak compression, height and weight (P<0.001).
Conclusions: The poor overall results, although similar to those shown in the literature, have made us question the validity of our methods of teaching BLS. We were able to establish a correlation between demographic and sociocultural variables with the typical errors, and to begin the process of improving our teaching methods.