YouTube CPR Videos Not Reliable

By Sondra Forsyth

If you want to learn CPR, better not trust a YouTube video to be your teacher. According to Turkish researchers, only a handful of CPR and basic life support (BLS) videos available on YouTube provide instructions that are consistent with recent health guidelines. The study was published in August 2014 in Emergency Medicine Australasia, the journal for the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine (ACEM).

The team of emergency medicine specialists reviewed educational videos from the last three years accessed via YouTube when the search terms “CPR”, “cardiopulmonary resuscitation”, “BLS” and “basic life support” were entered. A total of 209 videos were eventually analyzed. Only 11.5% of the analyzed videos were found to be completely compatible with 2010 CPR guidelines.

Of the many thousands of videos produced by these search results, most were excluded for a variety of reasons, including being irrelevant, being recorded in languages other than English, and being accompanied by advertisements.

A release from the publisher quotes Associate Professor Paul Middleton, Fellow of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine (ACEM) and Chair of the Australian Resuscitation Council NSW, as saying, “Although well-designed videos can create awareness and be useful as tools in training, they can never replace hands-on instruction from a properly qualified health practitioner. People wanting to learn CPR and BLS skills should seek out a properly accredited training course.”

Associate Professor Paul Middleton indicated that a few videos were available via YouTube which provided generally competent educational advice on how to perform CPR and basic life support, but finding them is not easy and very few could genuinely be regarded as perfect in teaching basic life support and CPR.