Policies and Options

OK, here's something to think about. Apparently this is CPR/AED Awareness Week (the very first one!), so the newspapers have an incentive (?) to publish stories about how unprepared we as a community are to help people in a cardiac emergency. According to Google, there seem to be plenty of Red Cross press releases, and some papers are carrying stories, like the AJC article above or this one in Frederick, but there are crickets chirping at the Washington Post, and my own Red Cross chapter -- you know, where I teach CPR and so forth to try to raise the community's preparedness? -- didn't think to mention it when scheduling classes this month or last month or list it on their training calendar. I know I should try harder not to be cynical, but looking at the Red Cross NCA page, it occurs to me that the Golf Tournament has top billing and there's no mention of the First Annual National CPR/AED Awareness Week because the Red Cross is pretty desperate for funds at this point and the Golf Tournament's a fund-raiser and the CPR classes, well, aren't. It might not have been a bad idea to advertise ahead of CPR/AED awareness week that CPR/AED classes this week or this month even would be free, to really kick-off and give people a little extra incentive to get involved, but hey, what do I know, I didn't even know we had a National CPR/AED Awareness Week, I just teach the stuff in exchange for t-shirts and such.

Here's where the policy and options part comes in. The AJC article mentions how many people don't even recognize an AED and how many fewer people are trained to use an AED than are trained in just CPR, and I know this is because the AED portion is optional. Every time I show up to teach a class, I have to check which version I'm teaching. Adult CPR? Adult CPR with AED? Adult, Infant and Child CPR? Adult, Infant, and Child CPR with AED? In a way all these distinctions make things easier. I know if I'm teaching Adult, Infant, and Child CPR, I've likely got a class full of camp counselors or in-home day care providers. If it's with AED, it's likely to be corporate-ish daycare or schools. Adult CPR with AED is probably fitness instructors and/or Nursing Assistants, although I get Nursing Assistants in the CPR without AED classes, too, because there's no consistency across their work-settings about whether the AED portion is a requirement. The policies where people are required to know CPR for their jobs all (or mostly, it'd just be wrong to generalize too much) require CPR without the additional specification of AED. The Red Cross could address this by just making it policy to teach AED whenever CPR is taught, but inexplicably that is not the case. Somehow it made more sense just to lobby for a CPR/AED awareness week during which it could be pointed out that most people wouldn't know an AED if it fell out of the wall at their feet. Is it the American Way that continuing to have obsolete options just for the sake of having options is preferable to phasing out the old options when better ones arise? (Looking at the heathcare system as a whole, I'm gonna have to say um, yeah.)

OK, so for the AED-uninitiated, I found a couple of links to introduce what is an AED? HowStuffWorks disappointed me by having a section on CPR that did not mention AED's at all, although they do mention defribrillators as part of the crash cart in and Emergency Room. (sigh) HowtoDoThings.com does have an article describing use of an AED. As noted, reading stuff on the internet is no substitute for getting training, so get trained. I'm teaching CPR/AED on the 24th in Silver Spring. I'm also teaching just CPR on the 10th, but it's full. It costs more to get AED with it. Policies and options...