Cardiopulmonary resuscitation is an emergency procedure which can be performed by medical personnel as well as by lay persons to save lives. A provider level training workshop on Basic Life Support was conducted on April 5, 2015 for the first batch of fifty residents and faculty of MGIMS. With this workshop, the Department of Pediatrics becomes the second center in Maharashtra to start a Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) Training Center accredited by the Indian Academy of Pediatrics (IAP).
The instructors—pediatricians, anesthesiologists and orthopedicians from Nagpur, Sevagram, Bhopal and Nanded—helped the audience learn how to assess an unresponsive person—an adult, a child or an infant— and how to give cardiac compressions and mouth to mouth breaths to revive the patient. Participants in the workshop were also taught how to save victims of choking by easy-to-use maneuvers. Instead of didactic lectures, the workshop used videos, live demonstrations and provided ample hands-on practice on life-sized dummies to reinforce the steps of CPR.
“Basic Life Support (BLS) is the most basic resuscitation that can be performed out of hospital without any drugs or equipment with our bare hands. Every responsible citizen should know this life-saving art, especially so if one is a health care professional”, informed Dr Bhat, an instructor from AIIMS, Bhopal.
“IAP, the apex national professional body of 23000 pediatricians in India, has evolved the BLS training program on the guidelines of American Academy of Pediatrics and American Heart Association. This training module focuses on both cognitive and psychomotorskills and is rich in hands-on practice. Each step of BLS has to be executed in a defined sequential way and in a strict time frame to ensure that the CPR is high-quality and effective and results in a neurologically intact survival”, pointed out the course director Dr Meenakshi Girish from NKP Salve Institute of Medical Sciences, Nagpur.
Participants were expected to score above 84% in the written test and pass the skills test in order to be certified in basic life support skills. In addition, a Training of Trainers or an instructor level workshop was held to train nine high-scoring participants who showed passion and motivation for teaching in the morning workshop.
One of the faculty participants, Dr Anshu said, “When I was a student 25 years ago, we were never trained in providing CPR. I was initially hesitant to join the workshop. But I decided it was more embarrassing not to know a basic skill than to attend it with my own students. It was a well conducted workshop where the large number of instructors gave individual attention to the correct acquisition of skills. What I enjoyed most was the skills test where we were given real life scenarios and asked to enact the correct sequence of C-A-B or circulation-airway-breath. It came as a pleasant surprise to be selected as potential instructor after the test.”
“In addition to the interested faculty, we plan to train all the MBBS and nursing students in batches and we aim to conduct awareness courses for the responsible and high-risk group from general public like traffic police, teachers or even parents,” informed Dr Manish Jain, the chief coordinator of this new CPR training center. Speaking at the occasion, Dr KY Vilhekar, Head of Pediatrics, narrated several anecdotes where CPR could have saved several precious lives had people been adequately trained.
The Department of Pediatrics at MGIMS already has IAP certified national resource persons for basic and advanced life support, and has also been conducting Pediatric Advanced Life Support training workshops every year for the residents and the practitioners. This IAP accredited CPR training center will be a new feather in the cap of MGIMS and will enable health care professionals and public acquire resuscitation skills.