AHA Focuses on Education for CPR Awareness Week
The American Heart Association's goal is to get 1 million people to learn about CPR during CPR Week, June 1-7.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of CPR, the combination of mouth-to-mouth breathing and chest compressions. The American Heart Association’s (AHA) goal is to get one million people to learn about CPR during CPR Week, June 1-7. AHA aims to increase awareness about CPR and automated external defibrillators (AEDs) so more people will know the steps to save a life if someone suddenly collapses from cardiac arrest.
According to AHA, training more people to perform CPR increases a victim’s chance of survival by enabling more possible bystanders to handle an emergency. Less than one-third of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest victims receive CPR from a bystander. Without immediate CPR, the chance of surviving out-of-hospital cardiac arrest drops up to 10 percent for each minute that passes without defibrillation. Skilled emergency personnel treat about 300,000 victims of out-of-hospital sudden cardiac arrest in the United States, but more than 92 percent of people who suffer cardiac arrest outside the hospital die from it.
“CPR and AED training are critical to saving lives,” said Dr. Michael Sayre, chairman of AHA’s Emergency Cardiovascular Care Committee. “CPR Week is one way we hope to increase awareness about cardiac arrest as a significant health problem and get teens and adults to take action so more lives can be saved.”
Learn more about CPR by:
- Playing the “Be the Beat” educational game or watching the Hands-Only CPR video at www.cprweek.org.
- Taking a classroom-based course. To find a course, go to www.americanheart.org/cpr and click on the ECC Class Connector.
- Training on CPR Anytime, a self-directed, at-home CPR kit. Kits can be ordered at www.cpranytime.org.
Once participants have learned about CPR via traditional instructor-led training or a CPR Anytime kit, they can log their experience at www.cprweek.org. Participants who play the educational game or watch the Hands-Only video on the CPR Week website will be automatically counted toward the goal. A real-time heat map will track the number of people who have taken action in communities nationwide.