Introduction

Pericardiocentesis is an invasive procedure performed to drain fluid from the pericardial cavity.

Aim

We investigated the quality of videos about pericardiocentesis on YouTube and analysed their reliability and teaching properties, in the covid 19 period when online education has come to the fore.

Material and methods

We searched YouTube using the terms „pericardiocentesis, cardiac tamponade, pericardial effusion, pericardial effusion drainage, pericardial tamponade” for uploaded videos. We scored every video according to the questions we prepared using the guidelines about pericardiocentesis. We used the HONcode score, GQS score, and RELIABILITY score to assess the quality of videos. Two physicians independently and blindly classified videos as useful or misleading and rated them.

Results

A total of 168 videos were examined. After the application of exclusion criteria, 38 videos were evaluated. The pericardiocentesis checklist average score was 10.45 ±2.56. According to sources of videos, the average score for university or research hospital videos was 13.1 ±1.5, and videos whose source could not be identified had an average score of 7.5 ±2.0. According to the level of HONcode, 17 (44.7%) videos were low quality; according to GQS score, 8 (21.1%) videos were poor quality. The quality of university hospital uploads (-coefficient 3.960, p-value 0.004) were higher and statistically significant than other upload centres.

Conclusions

The educational value of pericardiocentesis videos on YouTube are low. It is recommended that doctors and patients be aware of and adopt the developing technology, and they should prefer videos uploaded from university hospitals and educational hospitals.