Mercy offers Heart Trains Heroes

By Kenny Keane, Globe staff reporter
Posted January 23, 2003

In a cooperative effort with the American Heart Association (AHA) and other agencies, such as the Sioux City Fire Department (SCFD), Mercy Medical Center in Sioux City will present Heart Trains Heroes, a free CPR event on Saturday, Feb. 8.

With this event, which will be held at Western Iowa Tech Community College (WITCC) at 4647 Stone Ave. in Sioux City, the AHA hopes to teach CPR to 400 area residents.

"It's a mass training that can make an important difference in the community," said Barb Flynn, who works with continuing education at Mercy. "Typically when you take a CPR class you have to pay for those, but this is a free day for people to come and learn how. If more people knew how to perform CPR, more lives would be saved."

Flynn said they have 30 people who are actually volunteering their time as instructors, as well as 15 to 20 people who volunteer just to keep the day running smoothly.

"It's actually very simple. The instructors will take groups of people so they can actually practice," she said. "We'll have a lot of mannequins there on site, and they'll practice right in front of the instructors. This is not a certification, but it's just to train people so they know what to do so they're a little more comfortable in an emergency situation."

Heart disease is the nation's number one killer, and many of those deaths - about 220,000 each year - occur suddenly and without warning due to sudden cardiac arrest. According to the AHA, when performed effectively, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, can double a sudden cardiac arrest victim's chances of survival and add critical minutes to a patient's life until emergency medical care arrives.

"There's a catch to surviving cardiac arrest - CPR and defibrillation have to happen immediately," said Brian Thiele, education officer for the SCFD. "This means that if someone goes into sudden cardiac arrest in the middle of Sunday dinner, one person at that table has to start CPR while another dials 9-1-1. It has to happen that quickly."

The two-hour CPR training sessions will be held at 8 a.m., 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. for adult CPR and 2 p.m. for child CPR.

"We had a lot of requests for the child CPR course last year so we added that this year," Flynn said. "For those who want to attend both a regular one and the child CPR, they can do the one right before and just go from 12 to 4 if they'd like. If there are a lot of people who don't want that we'll just do a regular session."

The 10 a.m. session will also feature training in Spanish, which Flynn said was very well attended last year.

To learn more about Heart Trains Heroes free CPR event or to register for a session, call WITCC at (712) 274-6404.

For those who might be interested in the event, Flynn said, "I'd encourage them by saying that just by knowing how to start early CPR, they could help out in saving a life, and it might be one of their family members or a friend."