The purpose of this study was to find out the advanced life support skills of European nurses by getting acquainted studies that have already been done on that subject. This study was executed as descriptive literature review. The theory of this study deals with cardiac arrest and reasons for it. And the theory also tells what happens in resuscitation including nurses technical and non-technical skills. In non-technical skills the theory tells about the importance of leadership and teamwork in resuscitation.

The data of this study was collected from seven different databases and search gave a lot of hits. The headings of the hits were read and chosen the studies of which abstracts were read. After this some of studies were read completely, but just three of them were chosen for this study. Not even one Finnish study was chosen for this study. The original studies that were cho-sen, were read completely and translated from English to Finnish and the results of these studies were distributed by themes.

The results of this study were separated under three main themes. Those themes were nurses’ technical skills in resuscitation, nurses’ non-technical skills in resuscitation and resuscitation trainings impact to the nurses’ resuscitation skills. The results showed that nurses lack of both practical and theoretical skills of resuscitation. In technical skills of resuscitation nurses had lack on compression rate, compression depth, compressions with complete release and ventilation using resuscitation bellows. In theoretical skills nurses had lack in defibrillate rhythms. In non-technical skills nurses must improve leadership and teamwork skills. This study showed that it is very important to participate resuscitation training. Also nurses motivation towards training their resuscitation skills is very important.

The results of this study remained quite slight because there were so few original studies found for this study. It was also pity that there was none of Finnish studies found. I hope that Finnish nurses has better skills in resuscitation than their European colleagues have. This would be an excellent subject for additional study to compare Finnish nurses’ resuscitation skills to European nurses’ resuscitation skills. I think that you should give a lot of time for researching applicable original studies, because I believe that it would have been possible to find more studies if I had done more researches to databases with different keywords.