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On Monday, April 24th, the newly formed Red Cross Club offered hands-only CPR training to its members. Participants stayed in the LGI after school until 4 pm to learn.
Hands-only CPR is a type of CPR that is just chest compressions without rescue breaths. According to the American Heart Association, hands-only CPR is just as effective as regular CPR in the first few minutes of a cardiac arrest. Learning hands-only CPR does not give you an official CPR certification, though.
Either way, bystanders who have any CPR training feel more equipped to help during a cardiac emergency and are less likely to stand by passively.
Red Cross Club president Gbemi Odebode says they wanted to do the hands-only training because they “couldn’t do total CPR training and registration because it cost too much, and we couldn’t get someone official to come to the school. So, we wanted to get a few members trained so that they could eventually train other students at Avonworth.”
Four members of the club participated in the training: Odebode, Reese Theobald, Kalea Wilson, and Emma Noss, all sophomores. At the training, the participants first watched a video that demonstrated how to perform the compressions. They then learned the steps to perform CPR in a real-life situation and practiced how to carry them out. Finally, they practiced their compressions on dummies, which lit up to give them feedback on if they were pressing hard enough and deep enough.
The club members who attended felt that it was a good experience. Reese Theobald said that the training was “definitely helpful.”
Gbemi, however, had a more lighthearted take on the whole training: “It was really fun! You don’t realize how deep 2 inches is until a dummy’s lights are flashing yellow at you because it’s dying.”
