Efficacy of implementing intermittent STOP THE BLEED reviews on long term retention of hemorrhage control skills of first year medical students.

CONTEXT

Some medical schools integrate STOP THE BLEED training into their curricula to teach students how to identify and stop life threatening bleeds; these classes that are taught as single day didactic and hands-on training sessions without posttraining reviews. To improve retention and confidence in hemorrhage control, additional review opportunities are necessary.

OBJECTIVES

To investigate whether intermittent STOP THE BLEED reviews were effective for long term retention of hemorrhage control skills and improving perceived confidence.

METHODS

First year osteopathic medical students were asked to complete an eight item survey (five Likert scale and three quiz format questions) before (pretraining) and after (posttraining) completing a STOP THE BLEED training session. After the surveys were collected, students were randomly assigned to one of two study groups. Over a 12 week intervention period, each group watched a 4 min STOP THE BLEED review video (intervention group) or a "distractor" video (control group) at 4 week intervals. After the 12 weeks, the students were asked to complete an 11 item survey.

RESULTS

Scores on the posttraining survey were higher than the pretraining survey. The median score on the five Likert scale items was 23 points for the posttraining survey and 14 points for the pretraining survey. Two of the three knowledge based quiz format questions significantly improved from pretraining to posttraining (both p<0.001). On the 11 item postintervention survey, both groups performed similarly on the three quiz questions (all p>0.18), but the intervention group had much higher scores on the Likert scale items than the control group regarding their confidence in their ability to identify and control bleeding (intervention group median = 21.4 points vs. control group median = 16.8 points).

CONCLUSIONS

Intermittent review videos for STOP THE BLEED training improved medical students' confidence in their hemorrhage control skills, but the videos did not improve their ability to correctly answer quiz-format questions compared with the control group.