Introduction Childhood out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is a traumatic event for care givers and parents. Outcome is determined mostly by the time that CPR is started. Most times, parents are the first one to discover that their child needs CPR. Because of that, it is advocated that parents of high risk neonates, including NICU graduates, should undergo CPR courses.

Methods Parents of NICU or PICU admitted newborns underwent a private BLS course which included theoretical and practical training. This was a prospective trial. Every participant completed a pre- and post-test. Test evaluation was blinded.

Results 113 parents participated in the trial; 59 females and 54 males. The average score of the pre-test was 42.8±17.0 compared to 84.1±13.5 for the post-test (p<0.001). Only 26.5% passed the pre-test with a score higher than 60 compared to 96% in the post-test. All the participants that didn’t pass the post-test with a score higher than 60 improved their score compared to the pre-test.

Conclusions A private BLS course improves parental infant-CPR skills. The course achieves this important goal with very low cost.

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Barzilay et al