Ill. Nonprofit Teaches CPR to 800 Students

Journal Star, Peoria, Ill.

Mar. 21—It wasn't easy finding more than 80 CPR dummies to train everyone at Limestone Community High School in hands-only CPR in a single day.

But that was part of the challenge.

"It's never been done in Illinois before," said Josh Bradshaw, community resource manager at Advanced Medical Transport. "And we are learning a lot. We'll be using it as a model so we can replicate the training at other schools. The ultimate goal is teaching the schools to do the training themselves, so they can do a class every year."

AMT, Illinois Heart Rescue, OSF HealthCare Saint Francis Medical Center and Children's Hospital of Illinois teamed up for the event. Throughout the school day, groups were brought into the gymnasium, where they listened to a brief lecture and watched a video, then went to work on the dummies to learn both chest compressions and how to use an automated external defribillator.

The training is part of a statewide goal to teach the life-saving techniques to a broad swath of the general public.

"We want to have the highest cardiac resuscitation rate in the nation," said Bradshaw.

At one time, Illinois didn't have the greatest record when it came to cardiopulmonary resuscitation, said Teri Campbell, director of Illinois Heart Rescue, a not-for-profit based in Chicago. In 2012, the group received a $2.5 million grant to change that statistic.

"We needed to double survival for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest," she said. "Within the first three years, we doubled survival. Now in our fifth year, we've quadrupled survival and tripled bystander CPR in the state."

Illinois Heart Rescue worked first with emergency responders. Now it is focusing on teaching key skills to bystanders—it wants hands-only CPR to be something everyone knows.

The effort seems to be working. A number of students who took the class were brushing up on skills they had already learned elsewhere.

"I've done it before," said Chelby Carnes, 17, shortly after she and Alyssa Newman, 16, did two minutes of chest compressions on a CPR dummy.

"It hurts your wrist, but it's really helpful," said Newman.

Students were taught to push hard to compress the chest about halfway. They were also taught to press fast—in one class, the Bee Gees' song "Stayin' Alive" provided the rhythm for compressions.

Limestone high school staff members also took the class, said Assistant Principal Charlie Zimmerman.

"I did not know how to do this coming in," he said. "We had staff training before and after school today."

High schools are required to provide CPR training through the 2014 Lauren's Law, but the mandate was unfunded, so many schools have difficulty fulfilling the requirement. The class Wednesday will help Limestone train students going forward, said Zimmerman.

With the training, Limestone is the first high school in the state to achieve a Heart Safe status.

"We would like to partner with Illinois Heart Rescue as long as we can, but eventually we hope to offer something similar in our health and/or P.E. classes," he said.

As another round of students finished doing compressions on the dummies, Campbell told them that immediate and effective hands-only CPR more than doubles the chances of survival for cardiac arrest patients.

"You don't have to worry about the brain dying or the heart dying if you are doing good-quality CPR," she said.

Cardiac arrest is the No. 1 killer of people older than 40, and bystander CPR is key to improving survival rates, said Bradshaw. It only takes four minutes without oxygen for the brain to begin dying, and the average response time for an ambulance is five minutes, he said.

"You can have an ambulance on every corner, but it's not going to be as fast as the bystander who is present when cardiac arrest strikes."