Exploring the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour of the general public to responding to out-of-hospital cardiac arrest

Chapter 3 Conclusions and Next Steps

The overall aim of this study was to collect data on people’s knowledge, experience of, and attitudes to, bystander CPR to inform a social marketing strategy and/or health behaviour change activities to address the barriers to responding to OHCA and improve the rate of bystander CPR. In this initial analysis we have found that knowledge, experience, and attitudes towards bystander CPR is not evenly spread but differentiated according to socio-economic factors, primarily age; social grade and employment status:

• Age - the older a person is, the less likely they are to be CPR trained and show willingness to be CPR trained. They are also more likely to have had CPR training more than five years previously and be the least confident to administer bystander CPR. These findings are particularly relevant considering that most OHCA happen in the homes of older people.
• Social grade – people in professional managerial and non-manual occupations (according to the household’s main income earner’s occupation) are more likely than those in manual, unskilled occupations and long-term unemployed people (social grades C2DE) to be CPR trained and be more confident to administer CPR if talked through by a call handler.
• Working status - people who were working were more likely to be CPR trained, be trained more recently and show higher levels of confidence to administer CPR.

Based on the findings from this study our suggested priorities for a social marketing strategy to improve the rate of bystander CPR include:

• Engagement with people who are not CPR trained and improve the number of people who would like to be CPR trained.
• Specially target older people, unemployed and social class C2DE and people who are not required to be CPR trained for their employment or voluntary work.
• Address the barriers to administering CPR by building confidence and addressing myths/fears around administering CPR (e.g. fear of being sued, catching a disease).

How to access background or source data

The data collected for this social research publication:

are available in the accompanying data tables document