Mending broken hearts : Middle school pupils learn basics of life-saving measures
Posted on Thursday, October 9, 2008
BROOKE McNEELY Northwest Arkansas Times Emily Ritcheson practices CPR with the rest of her classmates at Prairie Grove Middle School on dummies from Ozark CPR Wednesday during health class.
PRAIRIE GROVE - Seventh- and eighth-grade students learned techniques that could help them save a life someday during Prairie Grove Middle School teacher Shelley Dougan's health class Wednesday.
The students learned the basics of how to perform CPR on adults, children and infants using mannequins that simulate real victims.
Kim Petit and Shandy Earp, CPR instructors with Ozark CPR, visited the class to show the students how to perform CPR. They also reviewed the Heimlich maneuver for choking victims and demonstrated how to use an automatic external defibrillator for victims of cardiac arrest and other afflictions of the heart.
Dougan said she wanted the students to learn the basics in case they were in a situation where an older family member or someone they knew had a heart attack.
"They won't be certified through the American Heart Association, but it will give them enough so they know what to do," Dougan said.
At the end of the class, the students received certificates stating that they had learned a basic "friends and family course"on CPR. The certificate is a step down from the certification through the American Heart Association, which requires two hours of training and is required for certain jobs such as swimming pool lifeguards.
Petit and Earp also provided the students with wallet cards with illustrations of how to perform CPR.
The students learned the basics of how to hold their hands on someone's chest while performing CPR and to do 30 chest thumps then give two breaths mouth to mouth.
On adults and children more than a year old, the person performing CPR should press the center of the chest between the nipples, Petit said.
"It's pretty much the same," Petit said. "You just don't have to push as hard (on children )."
The procedure is the same on infants less than a year old, except that only two fingers should be used to press down on an infant's chest, Earp said.
"Most of the time, with babies, their problem is a respiratory problem," Earp said.
With defibrillators, many of the devices will speak out instructions to the user on how to operate them, Earp noted.
"They're real simple," she said. "These are in almost all public places now."
Dougan noted that a defibrillator on the Prairie Grove Middle School campus is located in the school gym on the home-team side.
In July, the Arkansas State Board of Education adopted a new regulation that requires schools to have defibrillators on their campuses.
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