ACLS stands for Advanced Cardiac Life Support. It refers to a variety of medical procedures that health-care professionals sometimes utilize when attempting to save lives. Most often, a patient who has suffered a stroke or cardiac arrest requires these services.ACLS certification is required for certain people who work in the health-care profession. These individuals include many doctors, nurses
. and emergency workers. The main requirement for certification is passing an official ACLS test, which is available both offline and online. Certification remains valid for two years. At the end of that period, re-certification is necessary, so an individual must pass the test again.Individuals who want to take the ACLS test sometimes take a pretest as preparation. One sample pretest is posted at http://www.skillstat.com/ACLS_STAT_demo.html. It is broken into four main sections, which are cardiac rhythms, pharmacology, the basics and ACLS algorithms. Users can choose any section, answer a sampling of 10 questions taken from all four areas or try a random sampling of 25 questions. The test mode does not give ongoing feedback to the user, but the practice mode does. At the end of this sample test, the student's score is provided .A second pretest is available at http://www.gaems.net/cgi-bin/quiztest.cgi?aclspracticequiz. It consists of 33 questions with four potential answers apiece. The user is allowed to select only one of these options. After the test is completed, the answers are revealed. If the user answered incorrectly, both the right and wrong response are included. The user's score is also given.A pretest that features 61 questions is at http://www.norcal-cpr.com/documents/ACLS%20-PrecourseAssessment.pdf. Among other things, it requires the user to analyze an ECG, demonstrate knowledge of pharmacology and complete a section about practical application. This pretest is designed so that the taker can print it and complete the work on paper. An answer key is listed at the end. More reference links: http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/CPRAndECC/HealthcareTraining/AdvancedCardiovascularLifeSupportACLS/Advanced-Cardiovascular-Life-Support-ACLS_UCM_001280_SubHomePage.jsp# http://www.acls.net/aclsalg.htm