Introduction
chest compression
Practical skills training is an essential part of medical education. An important example is the training of Basic Life Support (BLS) skills, which are key to improve patient outcomes in life-threatening situations [Reflective practice has been put forward by medical curricula as a promising tool to enhance student learning outcomes through deliberate and active processing of acquired knowledge and feedback [Reflective practice is broadly defined as “a metacognitive process that creates a greater understanding of both the self and the situation so that future actions can be informed by this understanding” [Following this research, the aim of this study was to examine reflective practice as a tool to improve the learning outcome of standard BLS training (Peyton’s 4 step approach). For this purpose, we implemented a standardized reflective practice exercise to induce structured reflection on learners’ previous action and examined whether standard BLS training combined with structured reflective practice (1) increases students’ BLS performance (i.e. amount of effective compressions), (2) reduces their time to start performing BLS (i.e. time to first chest compression), and (3) increases students’ confidence in their BLS skills.