Background: Many patients with serious heart conditions or other problems such as heart attack refer to the emergency department every day hoping to escape from the deadly event.

Aim: To investigate the effects of using a training package on the knowledge and performance of nurses working in the intensive care units of educational hospitals of Ilam about cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in 2019.

Methods: This semi-experimental study with a pretest-posttest design was performed on 40 nurses. A validated questionnaire including 20 questions was used for data collection, and data analysis was conducted in SPSS V.19 using descriptive (frequency, mean, standard deviation) and inferential (correlation, linear regression, and t-test) statistics. The significance level was considered at P <0.05.

Results: In the present study, 31(77.5%) of the nurses were women, and 9(22.5%) were men. Regarding employment status, 27(67.5%) were contractually, and 13(32.5%) were formally employed. Also, 39 (97.5%) had bachelor’s, and one (2.5%) had master’s degree. The results of the study showed that the levels of knowledge and performance of the participants about CPR significantly increased after training (P <0.0001).

Conclusion: The results of the study showed that most nurses performed CPR based on old protocols. It is necessary to educate updated protocols during retraining courses. In addition, as the levels of knowledge and skill reduce over time, it is necessary to continuously repeat these courses.

Keywords: Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation CPR Training, Heart pain