What do Galician schoolchildren know about basic life support? A descriptive study

Background: Education of schoolchildren is an important issue in promoting the involvement of the lay public in improving survival after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. For this quality training it is necessary to know what schoolchildren know to establish what they need to learn about it. For this reason, the objective of this research was to evaluate the knowledge in SVB of schoolchildren in the 5th and 6th grades of Primary Education and students in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd grades of Secondary Education. Methods: During the first quarter of the 2021/2022 academic year, a survey was conducted of 947 Primary (n=308) and Secondary (n=639) schoolchildren between the ages of 10 and 17 from four schools supported with public funds from the Xunta de Galicia. Results: 62.81% of the students surveyed received prior training. 92.30% responded incorrectly to the correct sequence of action before a person with possible cardiac arrest and 93.14% did so to the correct order of execution of the AED for an effective shock. 82.40% of schoolchildren know the emergency telephone number. Secondary Education students and those who received prior training have better knowledge than Primary Education students (p < 0.001) and those who do not (p < 0.001), although in both cases they do not reach 5 points out of 10. Conclusions: Galician schoolchildren in Primary and Secondary Education have little knowledge of Basic Life Support, so they do not contribute to the "Children Save Lives" initiative.