If you go into cardiac arrest, the person who saves you just might be a Kentucky high school student.
The Kentucky General Assembly passed a bill earlier this year to require all public high school students to receive basic CPR training.
The American Heart Association pushed for the legislation as a way to create generations of potential lifesavers in communities across the state, said Tonya Chang, the association’s senior director of government relations in Kentucky and West Virginia.
Since eight of 10 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests occur in the home, these high school students “ may be called upon someday to save a family member,” she said.
At least 34 states have passed this kind of legislation, Chang said. Public high school students in Kentucky are to be taught CPR in a health or physical education course required for graduation or in a Junior Reserve Officers Training course that meets the PE requirement.
“I think it’s a phenomenal skill,” said Donna Benton, a practical living specialist for the Jefferson County Public Schools.
The legislation, which was sponsored by Sen. Max Wise, R-Campbellsville, is designed to increase students’ ability to respond to emergency situations at school, home and public places; help make them responsible citizens; and rapidly increase the number of people ready to respond to cardiac arrest, which is estimated to be the third leading cause of death in the United States.
Nationally, more than 326,000 people go into cardiac arrest outside of a hospital each year, and about 90 percent of them die — often because people around them don’t know CPR or fear they’ll do it wrong, according to the heart association. Another estimate, contained in a 2015 report from the Institute of Medicine, says less than 6 percent survive.
“Evidence indicates that bystander CPR and AED (automated external defibrillator) use can significantly improve survival and outcomes from cardiac arrest,” a summary of the IOM report notes. “Yet, less than 3 percent of the U.S. public receives CPR training annually, rendering many bystanders unprepared to respond.”
Cardiac arrest occurs when the heart suddenly stops, usually due to an electrical malfunction in the heart that causes an irregular heartbeat and disrupts blood flow through the body, according to the heart association. It is not the same as a heart attack, but a heart attack can cause cardiac arrest. Often, there are no early warning signs, and assistance is needed immediately to prevent death and disability, the IOM report notes.
“The key first step is to call 911 and the next step is to start bystander CPR, and if you get bystander CPR, it doubles or triples your chance of survival,” said Louisville physician William Dillon, an interventional cardiologist and advocate for CPR training.
But “the rate of bystander CPR in the United States remains low at only 26 percent,” according to the IOM report. Dillon and his wife, Sally, are co-founders of the Start the Heart Foundation, a local organization that teaches members of the public — including high school students in Louisville and elsewhere — how to respond to cardiac emergencies. CPR provides oxygenated blood flow, keeping vital organs alive until the heart is able to start pumping blood again, according to the IOM report. “I view CPR as a basic life skill like learning how to swim, learning how to drive a car,” Dillon said. “I think it’s a perfect fit for schools to educate” kids about CPR because “this is what schools ultimately do is they teach basic life skills.” The Start the Heart Foundation teaches the public how to perform hands-only CPR, a proven form of cardiopulmonary resuscitation that requires compressions — pushing hard and fast in the center of the chest — but no rescue breaths.
“We’ve taught over 16,000 people hands-only CPR in two years,” Dillon said. “A lot of them have been high school freshmen. They’re smart enough to do it, they’re physically able enough to do it, and the kids enjoy the class because it’s different than most people that come in and talk to them and drone on with a Power-Point.”
The students get to “put their hands on the mannequin,” and “we play ‘Stayin’ Alive’ a lot because that is close to the recommended compression rate for hands-only CPR,” Dillon said, referring to the famously catchy Bee Gees song. “ … We want it just a smidge faster than ‘Staying Alive,’ but it’s so well known that we’ve stuck with that. … We play it over and over during the class.”
Kentucky’s new law doesn’t require that students become certified in CPR, but it does require the training to be based on the American Heart Association’s Guidelines for CPR and Emergency Cardiovascular Care or other nationally recognized, evidenced- based guidelines.
Chang said hands-only CPR, which is intended for use on teens and adults, is a good option because it’s effective, fast, easy and takes less than a class period to teach.
It also gets around some people’s aversion to putting their lips on the victim’s mouth for rescue breaths.
“It’s all about you functioning as the heart, pushing that blood around, with that oxygen that’s in it around,” Dillon said. “You’ve got nine or 10 minutes worth of oxygen in your blood.”
The Jefferson County Public Schools brought the Start the Heart Foundation in last year to teach hands-only CPR to students in high school health classes.
“They went to almost every single high school, and they went like two or three times,” Benton said. “It’s unbelievable what they do” for free.
Start the Heart will return to JCPS this coming school year to teach CPR. It also will train interested teachers.
“They’re willing to teach the teachers, and the teachers can teach their own students” if desired, Benton said.
In keeping with a provision in Kentucky’s new law, Start the Heart also will be introducing students to automated external defibrillators, which are portable devices that can check a person’s heart rhythm and advise whether to administer a shock or keep doing CPR.
The foundation has visited Ginger Smith’s health classes at Doss High School multiple times, she said, and the instruction has been excellent.
“It’s really hands-on, which the kids love and the kids get excited,” Smith said. “I think they feel so empowered by the end of it, that they can really step in and do something” in an emergency, Smith said.
Veritie Howard, 14, an incoming freshman at du-Pont Manual High School, said she thinks it’s “a really good idea” that high schoolers must be taught CPR.
It’s important that “everyone knows how to help … in case someone is not breathing,” she said while taking a babysitting class at Baptist Health Louisville that included some CPR instruction.
The new law has special significance to Murray Gipe, 65, of Louisville, whose wife, Laura Alt Gipe, was posthumously featured in a video at the May 17 Go Red for Women Luncheon in Louisville.
Laura Gipe had appeared at the luncheon in the past to tell the story of how her teenage grandson, Jacob Murray, had saved her life by performing CPR on her during a cardiac emergency.
“I never thought it would happen to me, but it did,” she told the Courier-Journal in 2014. “Am I ever lucky that he was able to respond in that way. Anybody could do it.”
Though she died after collapsing at home in a separate incident last year, Murray Gipe still believes in the value of CPR and supports the new law.
“I’m glad to see that the schools are going to do something,” so people who suffer cardiac arrest have a chance to be saved, he said. “Miracles do happen.”
By Darla Carter
The Courier-Journal
