A committed group of University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson students make up the mighty team, under the leadership of Daniel Beskind, MD, MPH, FACEP, that last year taught 3,004 people compression-only CPR.
The students are
part of the UA Sarver Heart Center Resuscitation Research Group, which has an overall goal of improving survival rates from sudden cardiac arrest. The REACT Group conducts free training in lifesaving skills such as chest-compression-only (CCO)-CPR to members of the general public using resuscitation mannequins.
On Tuesday, March 11, the REACT Group will provide chest-compression-only CPR training for the employees of the Jim Click Automotive team. The training will provide the team with the necessary skills to save a life in an emergency situation. The REACT Group also will conduct training at the Tucson Festival of Books March, 15-16, and at Catalina Foothills High School on April 10-11.
“It is critical to integrate help from multiple people when attempting to resuscitate a victim. REACT classes incorporate this concept of collaboration by teaching people to work with other bystanders to effectively perform CCO CPR,” said Timothy Tiutan, a second-year UA medical student and an active REACT member.
The medical students in REACT educate the community on how to perform Chest Compression Only (CCO) CPR, a novel method of resuscitation developed through extensive research at the UA Sarver Heart Center. CCO CPR has been shown to be more effective than traditional CPR when attempting to resuscit
ate people undergoing primary cardiac arrest.
Thanks to the Click Family Foundation, the Arizona Emergency Medicine Research Center, the research arm of the UA Department of Emergency Medicine, has purchased a new resuscitation mannequin, which allows research to be conducted while also providing training to the general public on chest-compression-only CPR.
(For a training video that highlights how one girl saved a classmate after learning COO CPR, please view http://heart.arizona.edu/lifesaver-training.)
“The donation from the Click Family Foundation has helped the UA Department of Emergency Medicine continue providing training in lifesaving skills, while also ensuring that those skills are based on proven research. We could not complete these projects without this equipment. Mr. Click has been a tremendous support to us and the Tucson community as a whole and this equipment has helped us to train his staff and others in the community,” said Dr. Beskind.
Dr. Beskind is leading two research projects evaluating the effectiveness of an ultra-brief video in chest-compression-only-CPR. The video recently was shown during a UA Women’s Basketball game in which participants were invited to pre- and post-video viewing tests performed on the mannequin to assess recall retention in lifesaving skills. The second project involves testing high school students in CCO before and after seeing an ultra brief video in CCO- CPR.
Dr. Beskind is assistant professor at the UA Department of Emergency Medicine and is the co-developer of the educational series, Advanced Disaster Preparedness & Response, a four-hour course for health professionals designed to improve care for disaster victims. As part of the Knowledge Transfer Collaborative, Dr. Beskind and other UA Department of Emergency Medicine faculty members provide innovative continuing education in the field of emergency medicine to interdisciplinary health professionals worldwide.
About the UA Department of Emergency Medicine
The UA Department of Emergency Medicine faculty provide adult and pediatric emergent and urgent care services for more than 100,000 visits per year at the University of Arizona Medical Center - University Campus (UAMC), a Level 1 trauma center providing trauma care to the most seriously injured patients in Southern Arizona, Northern Mexico and Southwestern New Mexico, and at the University of Arizona Medical Center - South Campus (UAMC-South), where faculty provide emergency, urgent care and behavioral health care to the community. Research conducted by the UA Department of Emergency Medicine and the AEMRC has led to milestone achievements in pre-hospital care, cardiac arrest, trauma resuscitation, sepsis, medical toxicology, emergency bedside ultrasound, wilderness medicine and pediatric emergency medicine.