Emergency Medical Preparedness Essay

“It was a normal Saturday morning in 2012. My running group at the time had their regularly scheduled long run … like every Saturday. I was training for the Marine Corps Marathon, but there were many runners training for a variety of fall races. With less than 2 miles left in the run, a woman in a different pace group collapsed. She stopped breathing. Thankfully, an emergency medical technician (EMT) happened to be driving by and was able to administer CPR and get her to the hospital quickly. But what if that EMT hadn’t been driving by? What if no one had known what to do?” (D’Avanza) This quote from a popular running blog shows how even those people out there who think they are medically aware and being healthy are really not because they

If a person is dying and there are no medical professionals around the lay person needs to know how to respond if they are going to save a life. Knowing how to save a persons life seems like something every person would want to know how to do, but studies by the American Heart Association show that “70 percent of Americans may feel helpless to act during a cardiac emergency because they either do not know how to administer CPR or their training has significantly lapsed” (AHA). Also in a survey at Bellevue East High School it was found that more than 80% of those surveyed had no CPR and First Aid training or certification. This is a major problem because “nearly 383,000 out-of-hospital sudden cardiac arrests occur annually, and 88 percent of cardiac arrests occur at home” (AHA). Such a small percent of people trained as compared to a huge number of emergencies shows just how important CPR training is to be prepared to save a life. However, CPR is not the only important thing to be prepared to do in an emergency medical situation. Basic First Aid skills such as splinting, abdominal thrusts, seizure protocol, extreme bleeding protocol, allergic reaction protocol and heat/cold protocol are just as vital to saving a person’s life as CPR is. A person never knows when they could be in a situation like Josh Holt or Keith Hadley was in, where life saving skills such as those described above could come in