National League for Nursing, Laerdal Medical, and American Heart Association Team Up to Study Optimal Ways of Learning CPR

The National League for Nursing will collaborate with Laerdal Medical Corporation and the American Heart Association in an exciting new research study to determine how pre-licensure RN nursing students best retain CPR knowledge and skills. Ten schools, offering ADN, diploma, or BSN programs, to serve as test sites

New York, NY (PRWEB) October 9, 2008 -- The National League for Nursing will collaborate with Laerdal Medical Corporation and the American Heart Association in an exciting new research study to determine how pre-licensure RN nursing students best retain CPR knowledge and skills, the NLN announced today.

Different approaches to learning Basic Life Support (BLS) will be tested by students at 10 schools of nursing with associate, diploma, or baccalaureate programs. Students will complete the American Heart Association training in BLS in either a four-to-six-hour, face-to-face course of instruction or through the electronic delivery of information. After this initial training, students will be randomly assigned to a control group with no further practice or to an experimental group, which will practice CPR monthly for the 12 months of the study. The performance of all students, both the control and experimental groups, will be tested after three, six, nine and 12 months to determine their level of skill retention. This study will provide evidence for how we can help nursing students and other health providers maintain their BLS skills, noted Marilyn H. Oermann, PhD, RN, FAAN, ANEF, professor and adult/geriatric health chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and principal investigator for the nursing student component of the study. Other health care professionals, physicians, emergency medical technicians, and staff nurses are also included in this large interdisciplinary study with Suzan Kardong-Edgren, PhD, RN, serving as project director.

"We are delighted to be partnering with Laerdal Medical and the American Heart Association in this cutting-edge pedagogical inquiry," said NLN CEO Beverly Malone, PhD, RN, FAAN. "There is nothing more critical to student preparation for licensure and for the real world challenges of delivering safe, quality care than to maximize the synthesis and integration of knowledge and skill performance. We are grateful to Laerdal for funding this important research and to the American Heart Association for providing the learning platform."

The following 10 schools were selected to participate in the study, based on applications submitted in response to a call issued earlier this year by the NLN:

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Dedicated to excellence in nursing , the National League for Nursing is the premier organization for nurse faculty and leaders in nursing education offering faculty development, networking opportunities, testing services, nursing research grants, and public policy initiatives to its 28,000 individual and 1,200 institutional members.

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