Sudden cardiac arrest kills within minutes, and the first person on scene — not a paramedic — is usually the one who determines survival. Understanding how well trained workplace first responders actually are matters enormously, given that most adults spend the majority of their waking hours at work and bystander intervention in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) can more than double survival odds.
A cross-sectional survey administered to 520 designated first-aid responders at a large Italian university assessed Basic Life Support (BLS) competency using a 20-item questionnaire, with 355 usable responses returned — a 70% response rate. The average score was 9.59 out of 11, suggesting a generally solid knowledge base across the cohort. Notably, none of the variables typically assumed to influence performance — including gender, age, self-reported confidence, and time elapsed since the most recent BLS training — reached statistical significance in either univariate or multiple logistic regression models. However, meaningful differences emerged across academic departments, with Architecture faculty and staff outperforming those from History, Philosophy, and related humanities units.
The absence of a detectable training-recency effect is particularly thought-provoking and cuts against conventional wisdom that BLS certification should be renewed frequently to maintain skill retention. Prior research using mannequin-based performance assessments has consistently found that psychomotor skills — chest compression depth, rate, and recoil — decay significantly within months of training, even when knowledge scores remain stable. This study's reliance on a written questionnaire, rather than simulated resuscitation, likely captures declarative memory rather than procedural readiness, a critical distinction. The departmental variation suggests institutional culture, physical layout, or informal peer reinforcement may play underappreciated roles in shaping emergency preparedness. For organizations designing workplace safety programs, this finding implies that knowledge testing alone is insufficient as a competency benchmark, and that simulation-based refreshers targeting lower-performing departments may yield greater population-level benefit than uniform recertification schedules. An incremental but practically useful study.