Impacting practice through change: Implementing cardiopulmonary resuscitation into a Nebraska school’s curriculum

Abstract

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation is a life-saving technique that serves importance in many emergencies, in which someone’s breathing, or heartbeat has stopped. Despite strong evidence proving that basic life support (including cardiopulmonary resuscitation) improves survival rates after cardiac events, current studies show that there is a significant lack of knowledge regarding typical signs and risk factors associated with serious medical conditions (Enizi et al., 2016). Alarmingly, only a small percentage of the United States (U.S.) population knows how to administer CPR; indicating that the widespread implementation of CPR training will benefit high school students while impacting the broader U.S. public. In the state of Nebraska, it is not a requirement to learn CPR prior to graduation. The aim of this capstone project was to 1) establish a sustainable delivery model that provides CPR training and education to secondary school students in the 7th grade at a rural Nebraska high school and 2) to conduct a needs assessment of the secondary schools in the state of Nebraska to collect data about school demographics, details of CPR programs, cost, logistics, and barriers to implementation, as well as automated external defibrillator training and availability.