Abstract

Background:

Knowledge of cardiac arrest by health professionals is associated with sociodemographic, occupational and training characteristics.

Objectives:

To evaluate the factors associated with the knowledge of health professionals on Cardiac Arrest.

Methods:

A cross-sectional study conducted in a large public hospital in the countryside of Bahia – Brazil. The sample consisted of 18 doctors, 32 nurses and 50 nursing technicians. To evaluate the knowledge of the professionals, a questionnaire was constructed according to the current guidelines for resuscitation of the American Heart Association of 2015, and after that, it was submitted to three judges with expertise in PCR to verify content validity. Data were analyzed through descriptive statistics with univariate, bivariate and multivariate analyses using the logistic regression model. A value of p < 0.05 was adopted as level of significance.

Results:

The prevalence of insufficient knowledge of cardiac arrest among health professionals was 78%. After logistic regression, belonging to the professional category of nursing technician (p = 0.003) and nurse (p = 0.001) and working in the form of on-call duty for 24h (p = 0.005) was associated to insufficient knowledge.

Conclusions:

Insufficient knowledge of cardiac arrest among health professionals is high, which is a problem that requires urgent interventions in order to guarantee the quality of care. These actions should be based on realistic scenarios involving theoretical and practical activities. The periodicity of training should be short, given the deterioration of knowledge. The creation and validation of the data collection instrument allows for its applicability in other studies.