Photo courtesy of Pickerington Local Schools
Algebra. English. Hands-only CPR. History.
To take a line from Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the others.
The Pickerington Local School District is now in its fourth year of instructing students in hands-only CPR.
Hands-only CPR “is where you do compressions only (and) you don’t give breath,” says Sharon Schmitz, health supervisor for the district. It’s different from regular CPR, which involves a series of chest compressions and breathing into the person’s mouth, and is a new initiative from the American Heart Association to ensure as many people as possible are CPR-trained.
“What they found was that people that … aren’t medically trained, if they came upon someone that needed CPR, they were hesitant because they didn’t want to put their mouth on somebody else’s mouth and give breath. So they didn’t do anything,” Schmitz says. “But if we give compressions, it circulates the blood that’s in the person’s body that has oxygen in it … and so that will help sustain life until more trained people arrive.”
Photo courtesy of Pickerington Local Schools
Sharon Schmitz
Schmitz, who won the 2015 Rob L. Walker Heart Safe School Champion Award, has been a school nurse in Pickerington since 1993 and the school health supervisor since the late 1990s. She and the team of school nurses, who are all certified CPR instructors, train fourth-, sixth- and eighth-grade students, along with ninth- or tenth-grade students in the health classes at the high schools.
Schmitz says all faculty and staff members are trained as well. They go through drills in which a dummy is placed anywhere in the building and they have to find it, perform practice hands-only CPR and retrieve an AED kit to revive and save the dummy.
“We’re asking our teachers and all of our staff members to do some things out of their comfort zone,” Schmitz says. “We have not, thank heavens, had any cardiac emergencies, but they’re also more prepared for any medical emergency that comes up.”
The school district was the first in the nation in 2014 to become Heart Safe Accredited, a program started the previous year by the Sudden Arrhythmia Death Syndromes Foundation with local support from Fairfield Medical Center. Schmitz says this accreditation, which the district will pursue again this year, is important because a cardiac event can happen at any moment.
“We practice fire drills and we practice for other emergencies, and we need to prepare in the event that a cardiac event occurs during the school day,” Schmitz says.
The initiative in Pickerington schools has extended into the Pickerington community as well.
Photo courtesy of Pickerington Local Schools
Schmitz assists two students with AED kit on CPR dummy.
The Violet Township Fire Department has been instrumental in coordinating a community-wide hands-only CPR initiative, led by Fire Chief Mike Little.
Little, who joined the department in 1993 and became the fire chief in November 2014, says that while it is not the standard operating procedure employed by the fire department, hands-only CPR can be more effective for those who are not fully trained to save someone until EMS gets to the scene.
With cardiac issues in the U.S. on the rise, Little says, the eventual goal is for as many people to be CPR-trained as possible.
“Our goal would be to train as many people in the community as possible … in the hope that if something happens and they’re there, that they react and provide the care that needs to be provided to give that person the greatest possibility of survival they can have,” Little says.
Little hopes Pickerington’s awareness of cardiac issues and subsequent training to help those in need of lifesaving assistance will spread to other communities around the city. He also hopes more people will become CPR-certified, as it’s an easy process that could potentially be a lifesaver.
“It’s a pretty simple process. The nice part is that anybody can come in and learn it,” Little says. “It’s a skill that you can have with you the rest of your life and … hopefully save somebody’s life with.”
Zachary Konno is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.
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