Abstract Body: Background: Older adults are at high risk for experiencing out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, and therefore they are an important target for CPR training efforts. Physical, mental, and other barriers associated with advanced age present plausible obstacles to training/learning, and may warrant a need for tailored training programs.
Hypothesis: Barriers to CPR training for older adults may be widely characterized, but efforts to resolve them are limited.
Goal: This literature review’s purpose is to consolidate existing knowledge on teaching CPR to older adults and identify any gaps for future study.
Methods: A complete search in both CINAHL and PubMed was conducted for the capture period 2014-2024. The terms “CPR”, “bystander CPR”, “older adult”, “training”, “development”, “out-of-hospital cardiac arrest”, “chest compressions”, and synonyms were used. The full search strategy will be shared at time of presentation. Search results not mentioning CPR, elderly people, and training of older adults were excluded. Any duplicates between the two databases were resolved. Included articles were reviewed by 2 researchers. Age, sex, and study designs were documented and summarized, with ranges, percentages or means reported where appropriate.
Results: A total of 14 articles from CINAHL (n=8) and PubMed (n=6) were selected and were either qualitative surveys (n=4) or randomized control trials (n=10). In the studies reviewed, disparate knowledge or retention of CPR skills in older adults was linked to increased course duration or intricacy, physical or mental limitations (real or perceived), and lack of confidence. When analyzing the participants, the definition of older adult ranged from 55 to 65 years old and above with variable sample sizes (n=21-119, median=58). All the studies that documented sex had over 53% of older adults being female (n=53%-100%, median=64.85%). Studies identified methods to address limitations in older adults, including employing continuous chest compression delivery (versus 30:2) to improve quality/compliance, and Andrew’s Maneuver, also known as 4-hands CPR, for increasing effective compression depth while mitigating limited mobility and frailty.
Conclusion: Within current literature, established best practices for teaching older adults CPR are limited, and few studies attempt to characterize the limitations of training older adults. Of those studies available in the literature, valuable foundations are available for future work.