Basic Life Support

BLS used to exist alongside CPR HCP (Health Care Provider) for many years. Since then,CPR HCP has essentially been deprecated (scrapped) in favour of widespread adoption of BLS as a national standard for CPR among healthcare providers. While CPR HCP essentially taught lay rescuer CPR skills and added some additional topics geared toward professional healthcare workers, in a BLS course the time is spent practicing skills from the professional responder context from beginning to end. The goal of BLS is to become not just familiar, but proficient at performing CPR skills as a 2 person team with others certified in BLS. Since this is a national standard the hope is that widespread adoption of BLS will improve the efficiency and interoperability of healthcare teams the survival rate for patients who are in healthcare contexts where Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support may not be available.

No. CPR C is geared toward ‘lay rescuers’, or people who work in the community but may need to know CPR in case of a life-threatening emergency. BLS, or ‘Basic Life Support’ is geared toward Professional Responders and Health Care Professionals who work in a clinical environment outside of a hospital. CPR C will focus on basic life saving principles and how to do CPR in a variety of situations. BLS will focus on a very specific, detailed approach to performing CPR as part of a 2 person BLS team. BLS also covers more in-depth assessment and life saving treatments using more specialized equipment.

BLS stands for Basic Life Support which is geared toward Professional Responders and Health Care Professionals who may have to perform CPR before Advanced Cardiac Life Support is available The goal of BLS training is to become not just competent, but proficient at performing CPR skills as a 2 person team with others certified in BLS. To reach this goal of proficiency, BLS courses focus entirely on CPR (and other critical interventions) in the healthcare context, and do not address CPR for lay rescuers. This means much more practice time with the skills, tools, and teamwork involved in delivering CPR to a BLS standard. Also, certification is only valid for one year, requiring annual practice in the form of a shorter recertification course on an annual basis in order to stay certified. Since this is a national standard the hope is that widespread adoption of BLS will improve the efficiency and interoperability of healthcare workers and professional responders when performing CPR - and ultimately improve the survival rate for patients who suffer cardiac arrest in situations where ACLS may not be immediately available.