Helping hearts by hand and hi-tech for National CPR and AED Awareness Week

A double dose of heart health is happening as June 1-7 is National Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and Automated External Defibrillator Week.

Said more simply: Seven days to spread the word about CPR and AEDs.

“Our goal by 2030 at the American Heart Association is to double that rate of survival (from cardiac arrest outside of a hospital) from 10% to about 20%,” said Tim Harms, communications director of the AHA in Indianapolis.

He brought his knowledge and mannequins to practice on Daybreak.

“That’s kind of the whole reason for this week, is to increase people’s confidence to do it because we find that less than half of people in a recent survey said they would really know what to do and feel confident. And so it is about that muscle memory skill and building it. Find a way to practice. We have these online that you can order,” he said.

Harms explains as he compresses away on one of the training devices, “You need to compress the chest about an inch-and-a-half to two inches. And so that’s some serious work. It’s hard work. Fortunately, if this were a true emergency, we’d have some serious adrenaline going through our bodies, and that would keep us going because I’ve spoken to people who have done this for 10 or 12 minutes, and certainly they were exhausted at the end. But in the middle of it, they weren’t even thinking about being tired, or anything.”

For those who have not gone through re-training or certification for some time, the advice for CPR has changed from years ago. The focus for basic CPR is entirely on compressions; rescue breathing is “out.”

“The body has probably six to 10 minutes worth of oxygen already in it,” Harms explains. “So if someone collapses, their heart has stopped beating by doing the compressions, only you’re circulating oxygen that’s already in their blood and you can keep them alive without the rescue breaths.”

• Take an online CPR course
• Learn and practice with a CPR Anytime® Training Kit
• Watch a 60-second video to learn Hands-Only CPR
• Find a Heartsaver™ certification course near them

As for the other part of the June event, Harms agrees that in the 15+ years of the national campaign pairing CPR with AEDs, automated defibrillators have gone from a rare curiosity to a critical element in crisis care.

“They’re very simple to use,” he says. “You open it up. Some of them turn on automatically, some of them have a power button and then it walks you through. It will give you verbal commands with a picture, place the pads on the chest, it will analyze. I think the key for people to know is it will not let you shock a person who does not need a shock. So you can’t hurt somebody!”

If you’d like to get a sense of the proper pace for CPR, the Heart Association has recently updated its playlist of songs with the correct tempo for performing compressions.