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3 Reasons You Need BLS Training

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There’s no telling what could happen in the future. One minute, you and your colleagues are in a meeting and suddenly, someone’s on the floor, having a heart attack. The Centers for Disease and Prevention Control has said that about 735,000 Americans have a heart attack every year. Out of that figure, about 525,000 people are having a heart attack for the first time.

What The Numbers Say

Those are huge numbers. But what’s even more alarming is the fact that about 70 percent of Americans don’t know how to perform life-saving measures, the US News reported. Imagine the lives that could’ve been saved if only more people knew how to perform CPR or BLS. That could be you, a colleague or someone you love.

Benefits Of BLS Training

So if you’re wondering if you should go ahead and get BLS certification, we list down 3 of the best reasons why you should:

  • 1. It saves lives. There’s no greater satisfaction than knowing you’ve helped save a life, that you’ve done your part to ensure someone still gets to come home to his family or be there for Thanksgiving.
  • 2. When you do basic life saving techniques such as CPR, you don’t actually restart someone’s heart. Rather, you help him or her keep the blood pumping throughout the body. That means oxygen gets into the brain as well. Since you only have 4 to 6 minutes after the oxygen has been cut off before brain damage starts, BLS helps keep the brain’s oxygen supply steady, keeping brain damage and other possible complications at bay.
  • 3. It ensures faster victim recovery. Administering BLS techniques early on makes a difference in the patient’s rate of recovery. The sooner you carry out CPR or resuscitation measures, the better the patient’s chances at recovery will be.

 
Other Tips

  • 1. Go to a refresher course. Healthsafety says CPR knowledge retention falls in as short as 3 months. You never know when an emergency might involve someone you love. So keep your skills up to date.
  • 2. A lot of cardiac arrests happen at home. To ensure the safety and health of your loved ones, get everyone enrolled in a BLS course.
  • 3. Be first-aid ready. Accidents happen quite frequently at homes too. Make sure you know how to do first aid and keep your first aid kit stocked at all times.

 
For more information on CPR and First Aid courses, contact us at Simple CPR.

First Aid Do’s: How To Handle A Medical Emergency

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Taking care of your loved ones means being ready for anything, including medical emergencies. You don’t have to be a doctor to help, though. Read on to find out what you can do a lot to keep the situation from getting worse. Here are a few tips on how to deal with an emergency if and when it happens:

    1. Call 911.

This should be your first step in any situation. That way, you know help is only minutes away. Do your best to make sure the victim is in a stable condition until help arrives. If it involves a bad fall, don’t move the victim until the EMTs arrive. You might exacerbate the condition, otherwise.

    2. Learn How To Deal With An Emergency.

Emergency situations commonly involve someone choking, drowning or falling down the stairs. Educate yourself by learning how to do a proper Heimlich maneuver to stop someone from choking. Enroll in a training program to know how to perform CPR on someone who drowned. These skills will definitely come in handy especially if you’ve got kids in the house. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the leading cause of death in kids from 1 up to 14 years of age are unintentional injuries caused by accidents.

    3. Have Your Emergency First Kit Ready At All Times.

Administering first aid within seconds of an accident can help keep the damage from getting worse. This is especially true if you’re dealing with a cardiac arrest. Minutes count in such cases. By performing first aid measures such as CPR or BLS techniques, you can improve the victim’s chances of survival.

Conclusion

The best way to deal with a medical emergency is to prepare for it. So get yourself emergency-ready. Enroll in a first aid certification course to get the training and knowledge you need. That way, when emergencies happen, you won’t just stand there, frantically dialing 911. You can do more than help. You can make a difference by saving a life. For more information about CPR training, get in touch with us at Simple CPR.

Misconceptions About CPR You Need To Stop Believing

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Knowing how to do CPR isn’t just a handy skill to have. In an emergency, it can make all the difference between life and death. However, a lot of people seem to suffer from a ton of misconceptions when it comes to CPR. Read on to know a few so you know which facts to believe in and which ones to dismiss:

Belief #1: Only old or sick people need CPR.

Reality: Cardiac arrest can strike anyone. Whatever your race, gender or even age, you can suffer from cardiac arrest. One minute you’re doing fine and the next, you’re on the floor, struggling to breathe. Given the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s statistics—that someone suffers through a heart attack in the U.S. every 43 seconds—the numbers only mean that more people need to learn CPR in order to help. With U.S. News saying that about 70 percent of Americans don’t know the first thing in administering life saving measures such as CPR, there’s a lot of ground still left to cover.

Belief #2: CPR for adults is the same for kids.

Reality: While the steps are basically the same, there are important nuances you’ll need to consider. For instance, when you’re doing chest compressions, you need to exert less pressure on kids especially on small children and infants. If you don’t, you could cause internal damage, which is the last thing you want to happen.

Belief #3: You need to do mouth to mouth resuscitation all the time.

Reality: Not really. You can only carry out rescue breaths when the victim’s passage way is blocked with a barrier device. Without one, you’ll have to rely on CPR to get the job done. For many adults, CPR done with only chest compressions are an ideal life saving measure.

Belief #4: CPR always, always works.

Reality: It doesn’t. While it helps keep the blood pumping through the body, it can’t stop cardiac arrest in its tracks. However, cardiac arrests that happen out of a hospital environment only have a survival rate of 10 percent. CPR improves those odds, improving them by up to 30 percent, so long as there’s a defibrillator around to follow it up with electric shocks.

Conclusion

So lose the misconceptions. Read up on facts. And do what you can to help. If you already know CPR, but have long since forgotten the basics, it’s easy enough to get a refresher course or, in this instance, a CPR recertification class. To know more about that, call us at SimpleCPR today.