• Jörg Michel, Michael Hofbeck, Felix Neunhoeffer, Manuel Müller, and Ellen Heimberg.
• All authors: Department of Pediatric Cardiology, Pulmonology and Pediatric Intensive Care Medicine, University Children's Hospital Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany.
• Pediatr Crit Care Me. 2020 Feb 1; 21 (2): e114-e120.

ObjectivesChildren with chronic critical illness are at higher risk for cardiopulmonary arrests. Before chronically ill children are discharged from hospital, family members receive training in basic life support at many institutions. We evaluated whether a multimodal training program is able to teach adherence to current resuscitation guidelines and whether laypersons can be trained to perform both bag-mask ventilation and mouth-to-mouth ventilation equally effective in infants.DesignProspective observational study.SettingPediatric critical care unit of a tertiary referral center.SubjectsRelatives of children with chronic illness prior to discharge from hospital.InterventionsMultimodal emergency and cardiopulmonary resuscitation training program.Measurements And Main ResultsFollowing participation in our cardiopulmonary resuscitation training program 56 participants performed 112 simulated cardiopulmonary resuscitations (56 with mouth-to-mouth ventilation, 56 with bag-mask ventilation). Nearly all participants checked for consciousness and breathing. Shouting for help and activation of the emergency response system was only performed in half of the cases. There was almost full adherence to the resuscitation guidelines regarding number of chest compressions, chest compression rate, compression depth, full chest recoil, and duration of interruption of chest compression for rescue breaths. The comparison of mouth-to-mouth ventilation and bag-mask ventilation revealed no significant differences regarding the rate of successful ventilation (mouth-to-mouth ventilation: 77.1% ± 39.6%, bag-mask ventilation: 80.4% ± 38.0%; p = 0.39) and the cardiopulmonary resuscitation performance.ConclusionsA standardized multimodal cardiopulmonary resuscitation training program for family members of chronically ill children is effective to teach good cardiopulmonary resuscitation performance and adherence to resuscitation guidelines. Laypersons could be successfully trained to equally perform mouth-to-mouth and bag-mask ventilation technique.

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