ProCPR Blog

1. Smokers die young.

Smoking is the number one cause of preventable disease and death in the United States, and half of all regular smokers are killed by smoke related diseases.  Smokers are 2-4 times more prone to heart attacks than non-smokers.

2. You stink!

Seriously.  And the smell isn’t harmless either.  If someone just smells the smoke, they’re actually breathing the cancer causing agents that are found in the smoke, either first or second hand.  And it’s just as dangerous.

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This is a subject that is very close to my heart, and likely close to many of yours as well.  While it doesn’t have much to do with CPR, use of this font could help people learn CPR indirectly.  According to the National Institutes of Health, in the U.S., one out of every five persons is dyslexic.  There are many different levels of dyslexia, so one font can’t help everyone with the disorder, but the font has helped many in tests so far.  I’ve got a mild form of dyslexia, which greatly slows my reading speed and comprehension, and reading the article about the font, written with the font, I found it really helped.

Whereas the majority of typography designers want their fonts to be aesthetically pleasing (think of the flowing serifs of Lucida Calligraphy or the chiseled lines of Arial), Boer was more concerned with reading comprehension. He estimates that the time he spent designing his font added up to 15 hours per letter. He even recruited dyslexic college pals for feedback.

One of the first things he did was increase the boldness of letters at their bases, to make them appear weighted, causing readers’ brains to know not to flip them upside down, as can occur with “p” and “d.” Boer also enlarged the openings of various letters, such as “a” and “c,” to make them more distinguishable from one another, and increased the length of “the tail” of other letters, like the “g” and y.” He also put certain letters at a slant so that they would appear to be in italics, like the “j,” a tactic to increase the brain’s ability to distinguish it from the letter “i.” Finally, he boldfaced capital letters and punctuation, and provided ample space between letters and words, to allow the brain more time to compute the letters and begin forming them into words and sentences.

Read more at Scientific American (read the article in the Dyslexie font (pdf))

Order the Font from his website (Available in English and Dutch)

Two-and-a-half years after her heart stopped for almost an hour, bus driver Laura Geraghty said Monday she would have died if it weren’t for an automatic external defibrillator on the grounds of Newton South High School and some timely CPR.

“That defibrillator and that CPR is what saved my life,” Geraghty, of North Attleboro, told lawmakers, describing her sudden heart failure during a school bus run that took her to the Newton school in April 2009.

Today, Geraghty is urging lawmakers to require schools to carry defibrillators for the rare but critical moments they’re needed to save a life. Geraghty spoke at a hearing of the Legislature’s Committee on Public Health on behalf of a bill that would require schools to have an “on-site” defibrillator.

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Coda, a seven year old yellow Labrador retriever, was found sitting in a rocking chair in the room that the firefighters believe the fire started.  The dog had become trapped in the room during a house fire.

Firefighters arrived shortly after being notified of the fire, and were able to locate the dog, and carried him outside where they began mouth-to-nose (or mouth-to-snout) artificial respiration.  They placed an oxygen mask over the dog’s nose and washed some of the soot from his fur.

Firefighters Jamie Giese and Jared Thompson both said they have no formal training in animal rescue.  “It was all improvised,” Giese said.

Thompson said he remembered a few tips from the former reality television show “Rescue 911.”

Coda was taken to VCA Companion Care Animal Hospital in Wausau, and later transported to an animal hospital in Mosinee for an overnight stay to recuperate, Todd Borchardt said Tuesday night.

See photos and read the whole story.

“It must become a moral obligation and a social expectation that bystanders will perform CPR when they witness cardiac arrest,” said a declaration from the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians.  The CAEP is the Canadian national voice in emergency medicine, and develops standards and guidelines in this field.

The CAEP called on governments to implement mandatory CPR education in high school, insisting that the process should be a pre-requisite for graduation.

Companies that offer CPR education and Canadians that sign up for training should receive a 100 per cent tax rebate to cover the expense, the report also suggested.

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Tricking the immune system can help to make the allergen safer and to prevent the body’s life-threatening reaction.  Researchers found that they could trick the immune system into thinking that nut proteins aren’t a threat to the body.  The preclinical study achieved peanut tolerance by attaching peanut proteins onto blood cells and reintroducing them into the body.  Using this approach may also allow more than one food allergy to be targeted at a time.

“We think we’ve found a way to safely and rapidly turn off the allergic response to food allergies,” said Paul Bryce, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of allergy-immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Bryce and Stephen Miller, professor of microbiology-immunology at Feinberg, are co-senior authors of a paper published in the Journal of Immunology.
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Recent discussions with behavioral health providers around the country reveal significant cutbacks in state and federal funding.

In most instances of cost-cutting efforts, training staff is often compromised in quality or eliminated entirely.

One employer was thrilled to identify a provider such as ProTrainings.com that significantly reduced training budgets, yet feedback from staff was more positive about the quality of the instruction than ever before. This person indicated they were spending over $60.00 per person for CPR and first aid certification and were compensating staff for over six hours of labor time. Both issues were reduced to one-third the original amount.

Learn more about how our group program can save your company time and money while boosting the quality of training.  Visit our Group Programs page today.

What we hear from our clients daily revolves around two key points:
1. Must I have staff trained every year? Time and money are in short supply.
2. May I have my staff certify every year? Two years between certifications is too long to retain proper skills.

Unless your state mandates annual training, there are some providers that may adjust the certification cycle between one or two years depending on your preference or requirement. Studies indicate that if CPR is not used or reviewed every 13 weeks (give or take), vital information and the confidence to respond to a crisis is greatly diminished.*

The point is even once a year is too long between certifications, thus frequent review of the material becomes more critical. ProTrainings.com is one provider that offers weekly video refreshers by email after certification to ensure better results and more confidence regardless of the certification timeline. Employers now have the best of both worlds, frequent review with a longer time between certifications.

A student from Harbor High School went into cardiac arrest during his physical education class on Wednesday morning.

The students were jogging when the incident happened.  It was shortly after they had begun when the student fell to the ground.  Fellow students called out for the teacher, Bassel Faltas, who ran about 100 yards to the scene.  He also called 911 from his cell phone on the way.  By the time he reached the boy, he was still breathing, but later stopped.  The teacher began CPR before the paramedics arrived.

The student was taken to Dominican Hospital, and flown from there to Sanford University Medical Center, where he remains hospitalized.

The school has offered counseling to the students to discuss any of their concerns.

Things like this really reinforce the importance of students learning CPR in high school.

-via

When I was at the dentist, I heard an amazing story that I somehow missed over the weekend about a rescue at a football game.  He was at the game between Michigan and Notre Dame when he suffered a heart attack during the second quarter, while at Michigan Stadium.  He was visiting Ann Arbor with his three sons, who are aged 45, 48 and 50.  My dentist knows of the sons.

Lee Staudacher, a 69-year-old from Bay City, Michigan, was enjoying the game when his heart suddenly stopped.  There was a dentist nearby that started CPR while others contacted emergency services.  The CPR was prompt, increasing his chances of survival greatly, and there was an on-site AED (Automated External Defibrillator) that was also put to use.

His family stayed nearby and watched while they shocked him with the paddles, and the prompt CPR was a key component in saving his life.  The medical team took him to the University of Michigan Health System’s Cardiovascular Center for treatment.  He didn’t miss the end of the game, as he was able to watch part of the fourth quarter while in an intensive care unit bed.

He’s a Notre Dame fan, but had a great time watching the game between these two old rivals, even though Michigan pulled off a 35-31 victory.  He wants to put the focus on the knowledge of CPR and the quick access of the AED that saved his life, however.