Resuscitation skills need reviving

Many health professionals have to meet less stringent requirements for CPR training than workplace first-aiders, according to a paper in the New Zealand Medical Journal (11 March).

An audit of New Zealand’s 37 health professional regulatory bodies and medical colleges found only 18 require some form of CPR training and not all demand recertification. One the other hand, workplace first-aiders must brush up their skills every two years.

“The public, patients and whānau should be able to reasonably expect health professionals to be able to do CPR at a level appropriate to the clinical setting,” says corresponding author Dr Jonathon Webber, director of the Simulation Centre for Patient Safety at the University of Auckland.

Only six of the 17 health professional regulatory bodies and 12 of the 20 medical colleges that operate in New Zealand require some form of CPR training and certification.

Given CPR skills can decline after six months, the authors would like to see all clinical professions undergoing training and regular refreshers.

“It’s not a requirement of all registration bodies and perhaps it should be,” Webber says.

Webber teaches resuscitation programmes to students in the Faculty of Medical and Health Science and was keen to see how their skills were maintained out in the field.

Webber and fellow authors, Daniel Harvey, director of Sports & Spinal Physiotherapy, Auckland and senior physiotherapy lecturer at AUT University Daniel O’Brien, found considerable variability across professions. At one end, midwives, dentists, podiatrists and pharmacists have comprehensive requirements for initial and ongoing training in CPR, while at the other end, a large group, nurses, do not.

“During the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccination programme, a significant number of nurses had to undertake emergency resuscitation training to meet the Ministry of Health’s vaccinator requirements because they did not have a current certificate,” Webber says.

While it isn’t necessary for all health professionals to be able to perform advanced CPR, they should be maintaining their skills to a level appropriate to their workplace, he says.

The paper’s authors had a very positive response from the organisations they approached, Webber says. “They wanted to see the findings so they could benchmark themselves against other colleges or professions - in some cases, the issue had been on their radar for some time.”