Sorry that is crazy! Anybody can do CPR. It saves lives!!
Hard to believe it is better not performing CPR than using in an emergency. Same with Heimlich maneuver…if someone is turning purple with a piece of steak lodge in throat…I’m supposed to just stand around and not try to help?
So far what I got out of D1 is that you need to know whether the heart has stopped beating, the person isn’t breathing. Otherwise, you’re just breaking ribs. Or worse.
Point is: know what you’re doing and why. For real.
The things is it could be so much better for someone not to try CPR than to try CPR. Standing around doing nothing could very well be considered helping, given that someone has called 911 and hep is on the way and one person is tending to the vitals.
Really, the thing with CPR is correctly assessing whether the heart has stopped, the person is dead anyway, what harm can you do? Of course, assessment that is the tricky bit. Back to drunk Fiona and her friends and the AED. The physicians’ fear of successful on street CPR is probably unfounded, your average chest thumping joe isn’t going to get anyone back. It is the near death stuff that gets you in the ICU for the protracted death.
I’ve taken job required training for CPR, AED, and first aid for jobs at YMCA, state park, state university, on campus graduate clinic internship…I was never told not to use CPR if in my judgment I felt it should be used…have never had to use CPR though.
I’m interested to see what the OP comes back with. I’m wondering (and this is a PURE guess) if the RAs were told not to use CPR (not sure what’s going on with the AED) unless they were properly trained and certified.
It is very easy to tell if a person is not breathing. All RA and school employees should be trained in CPR. I cannot imagine any child not breathing and people just standing around. Guess I am pro CPR because I am a critical care nurse.
I can understand why AEDs are not in dorm halls. Unless there is a student known to have a heart problem the need for them is probably remote and as Gator mentioned, some drunken student would probably misuse them.
I was taught that under the Good Samaritan rule, giving CPR to a person who is neither breathing and whose heart has stopped, I can’t be sued. I suppose a lawyer here will say otherwise. I have seen several lives at least prolonged until EMT’s arrived. Many years ago a friend at U of R performed it on someone’s visiting grand mother. The lady died hours later but the family wrote my friend a letter of thanks.
The only training needed to use an AED is to pull the thing off the wall and hit the on button. I just finished training on this. They are designed to walk you through everything.
I would ne interested in hearing from the school.
I haven’t read all of the posts.
I am a physician. I would presume that the reason for this rule is because it is very hard for a 18-22 year old person to adequately assess whether an unconscious person has no heartbeat/pulse and is not breathing at all. Frankly, it’s pretty tough to determine this in a hospital setting. Add on top of it that the most common cause of being unresponsive is too much alcohol or drugs where you still may have a very weak pulse or or breathing and it might be in a loud environment where they can’t properly assess the kid.
Doing Cpr on a person who does not need cpr will result in broken ribs, prolonged hospitalization, the ribs may puncture lungs, surgery, and lawsuits. Given that the most common reason that a person is found “down” would be due to drugs or alcohol and does not need cpr, the rule ends up protecting RAs and the university from lawsuits. For the minute number of kids who really needed cpr, the RA and uni will not get sued for NOT administering CPR.
Why do hearts stop? Heart attack, which usually does not happen in a young adult. What about heart arrhythmias? For ventricular fibrillation, cpr would work until you were able to deliver the electric shock (aed). As a physician, I could tell if someone is in vfib. But I can assure you that someone who did an 8 hr cpr course could not determine this.
Bottom line is that the no cpr rule protects to RA and the uni. The RA and the uni will never get sued for NOT doing CPR.
@college67,
As a critical care nurse, how many times are we (you and ICU nurse, me a physician) looking at patients and not quite sure if we should call a code blue. How many times is a code blue called and the whole anesthesia team rushes in but it ends up that they do not need to do cpr, and other maneuvers need to be done? Alternatively, you do know exactly when to call the code blue because your patient is covered with monitors already. And this is in a hospital setting. Imagine this in a dorm room with noise, other kids, drunkeness, panic.
@YoHoYoHo, it seems to me you’re giving a good reason for RAs to be instructed not to perform CPR, even ignoring any risk of lawsuit. You say the chance that an RA will perform CPR on a student who needs CPR is miniscule, because students rarely need CPR. You say the chance that an RA will perform CPR on someone who does not need CPR is much more likely, because RAs will encounter students passed out from drugs or alcohol, and wrongly think they need CPR. If CPR is done unnecessarily, the person is likely to end up with broken ribs, which may puncture their lungs, or they may have other bad health consequences. They might need surgery. They might need a prolonged hospitalization. All of those bad consequences would have been avoided if the CPR was avoided.
So, miniscule benefit, substantial risk. Sounds like a reason not to do CPR, to me.
@YoHoYoHo I do agree with you. There are plenty of times that we press the code button at the hospital and everyone comes running and then the code is not needed. But I do think the RA should all be CPR trained. If once a college student goes down and everyone is just standing by and does nothing and there is really something wrong with that child. Could you imagine. My child is leaving for school this August and I would like to think my child is helped if something happens.
@YoHoYoHo unfortunately we had two high school kids go down on the field doing sports and died this year! Unfortunately sometimes heart conditions are not detected until it’s too late.
Yes.
No
Sure, but they are extremely rare, it is statistically not worth trying to train a bunch of teenagers to spot that rarity.
That’s why calling the campus security makes the most sense to me…they are only a couple of minutes away from any place on campus and they are adults trained in emergency aid.
Editied to add: the numbers are rare: <1cardiac death /100,000 high school athletes. Of course, the most rigorous activity in a dorm is broom hockey (or sex?)? But the point is that a typical RA will go 4+ years and never experience anotehr student with a cardiac problem.
@college67,
That is so sad that you had 2 kids go down on the field and die this year. Do you know the cause? Would cpr have helped? Was it after head trauma? Was cpr performed on the field?
You probably know, as well as I know, that if the kids died from an epidural hematoma, cpr would not help. If the kid died from a ruptured aneurysm, cpr would not help. Cpr would only help if kid wither had a heart attack or a heart arrhythmia during the sport. Or if the kid had a drowning, the cpr would help. Can we rely on 18-22 yr old kids who had an 8 hour training class to know what to do in these situations?
@college67,
I do agree with you that all RAs should be cpr trained. I also think lifeguards and babysitter should be cpr trained as well.
I do also understand why a college is restricting the RAs use of cpr. Clearly the uni recently got sued.
I worked in public education and I was CPR certified for at least the last 20 years…and learned all different kinds of CPR over that time, as the protocol seemed to change periodically. While I was glad to have this skill set, I was also glad that in my 20 years of being certified, I was never called on to use it.
We also had an AED in the building, and were trained to use that as well. Again, it was never used (except in periodic tests to make sure it was working).
My kid is CPR certified, but then she is also an EMT. She has had to use her skills…but she is the one who gets sent when 911 is called.
My guess is the college felt there was a potential or real,liability issue. I’d love to hear an update from the OP.
@lizard,
I would recommend that anyone could and should do a hemlich maneuver on a choking person. Risk of anything bad happening for hemlich and risk of misdiagnosis of choking is extremely low.
Hemlich maneuver is not CPR.