Spencer Butte Middle School has become the first school in the state to be deemed a HEARTSafe Campus.
To gain this title, the school had to train on responding to sudden cardiac arrest and meet certain criteria, some of which includes having an AED on site, a Cardiac Arrest Response Plan with drills, and completed at least hands-only CPR training.
For the past eleven years, the school’s P.E. teacher, Sami Abbitt, has partnered with the Eugene Springfield Fire Department and PeaceHealth Riverbend Hospital to train all of her students in compression-only CPR.
Having thousands of middle school students trained supports the fire department’s mission to increase the out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival rate.
“They take it very seriously," says Abbitt, the HEARTSafe champion. “They are amazing when it comes to really getting into it and wanting to do it and wanting to have their chance to be able to learn how, so that if anything were to ever happen, they would be prepared - and I feel like they are prepared.“
Not only does this create a safe campus, it also makes the broader community safer, because the more people who are trained in at least compression-only CPR, the more likely a victim of cardiac arrest is to survive.
The Director of Cardiovascular Services for PeaceHealth Riverbend, Dr. Richard Padgett, explains just how vital those compressions are in saving a life.
“What we do within the walls of the Hospital only goes so far,” he explains. “If we don’t have the community support, if we don’t have EMS, if we don’t have people supporting that patient in their time of need, it really doesn’t matter what we do in the hospital. So, it takes this - from the moment they collapse to the time they get to the hospital.”
The Eugene Springfield Fire Department has been working toward becoming the first HEARTSafe community in the state.
To make that happen they must complete 13 criteria put forth by the Citizen CPR Foundation. One of the 13 criteria is to create a dedicated HEARTSafe Campus. With that completed, they will be submitting their paperwork to the foundation next month to become the fifth HEARTSafe community in the nation.