2020 American Heart Association Guidelines for Education Science

In Infographics by Kimberly VellaLeave a Comment

This year, the American Heart Association released the updated 2020 Guidelines for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Emergency Cardiovascular Care; the first major update to the internationally recognized guideline in five years. CanadiEM has worked alongside the AHA to produce infographics summarizing these updates. 

The “Top 10 Things to Know” for Education Science are as follows:

  1. Effective education is an essential contributor to improved survival outcomes from cardiac arrest.
  1. Use of a deliberate practice and mastery learning model during resuscitation training improves skill acquisition and retention for many critical tasks.
  1. The addition of booster training to resuscitation courses is associated with improved cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) skill retention over time and improved neonatal outcomes.
  1. Implementation of a spaced-learning approach for resuscitation training improves clinical performance and technical skills compared with massed learning.
  1. The use of CPR feedback devices during resuscitation training promotes CPR skill acquisition and retention.
  1. Teamwork and leadership training, high-fidelity manikins, in situ training, gamified learning, and virtual reality represent opportunities to enhance resuscitation training and may improve learning outcomes.
  1. Self-directed CPR training represents a reasonable alternative to instructor-led CPR training for lay rescuers.
  1. Middle school– and high school–age children should be taught how to perform high-quality CPR because this helps build the future cadre of trained community-based lay rescuers.
  1. To increase bystander CPR rates, CPR training should be tailored to low–socioeconomic status neighborhoods and specific racial and ethnic communities, where there is currently a paucity of training opportunities.
  1. Future resuscitation education research should include outcomes of clinical relevance, establish links between performance outcomes in training and patient outcomes, describe cost-effectiveness of interventions, and explore how instructional design can be tailored to specific skills.
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Further reading:

Heart & Stroke 2020 Guidelines for CPR and Emergency Cardiovascular Care

American Heart Association 2020 Guidelines for CPR and Emergency Cardiovascular Care

Kimberly Vella

Kimberly Vella

Kim Vella is a senior medical student at Queen’s University. Prior to medical school, she completed at Master of Science at Dalhousie University. She is interested in medical education.
Sonja Wakeling

Sonja Wakeling

Sonja is a PGY-2 in Emergency Medicine at McMaster University and a Junior Editor with CanadiEM. Her academic interests include medical education (with a budding interest in simulation), quality improvement, and resource utilization. If you can’t find her in the resus or trauma bay of her local ED, she may be tending to her growing houseplant collection or cycling along the excellent paths in Hamilton
Sparsh Shah

Sparsh Shah

Sparsh Shah is an incoming Emergency Medicine Resident at the University of Toronto. He has interests in trauma, global health, and healthcare innovation.
Comilla Sasson

Comilla Sasson

Comilla Sasson, MD, PhD is an Emergency Medicine Physician and serves as the Vice President of Science & Innovation, Emergency Cardiovascular Care at the American Heart Association.