Are final year medical students ready to save lives in Italy? Not yet

We read with interest the paper by Perkins GD and colleagues on a series of initiatives to improve outcomes from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest in which teaching cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to schoolchildren play a key role.1 Evidence in the literature confirms that teaching CPR in school saves lives.2

If even schoolchildren know CPR, even more so a young doctor should know how to treat a cardiac arrest. However, since we started to teach CPR to lay people in Italy, we noticed an increasing number of medical students attending our CPR/AED (CPR with the use of an automated external defibrillator) courses, revealing an unexpected need that Universities didn't satisfy. We therefore decided to investigate the knowledge regarding cardiac arrest and CPR in medical students at the end of their degree course. We designed an anonymous online survey, which was distributed from April to May 2016 to all...

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