YouTube can teach you many things from how to style your hair into victory rolls to how to play guitar, but if you want to pick up advanced first aid, you might be better off looking elsewhere.

A new study has analysed videos showing how to perform CPR and basic life support on YouTube and discovered that many are not consistent with health guidelines and do not qualify as educational material.

The research was carried out by a team of emergency medicine specialists from Turkey who filtered through thousands of results after searching using the terms "CPR", "cardiopulmonary resuscitation", "BLS" and "basic life support" to find the videos that were relevant enough to be analysed. Videos that incorporated advertising, were off-topic, that weren't posted between 2011 and 2013 or that weren't in English were excluded.

International guidelines for CPR were established in 2010 and adopted by many regional and national organizations and each of the 209 videos was rated on whether or not they displayed the correct order of resuscitation efforts in accordance with these guidelines.

In total, only 11.5 percent of the videos were found to meet the standard to which they were deemed compatible with the guidelines. It made no difference what the source of the video was or when it was published, and neither was there any correlation between the number of video downloads and a video's compatibility with the guidelines.

"Although well-designed videos can create awareness and be useful as tools in training, they can never replace hands-on instruction from a properly qualified health practitioner," said Professor Paul Middleton, fellow of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine and chair of the Australian Resuscitation Council NSW. "People wanting to learn CPR and BLS skills should seek out a properly accredited training course."

The study was published in the journal Emergency Medicine Australasia and suggests that while there are some videos that provide competent advice out there, they are unlikely to be easily identifiable.