Illinois Heart Rescue, WorldPoint team up to support CPR training in high schools

Illinois high school students will be able to learn CPR with new equipment thanks to Illinois Heart Rescue and WorldPoint.

As part of their mission to train as many Illinois residents as possible, Illinois Heart Rescue, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing survival for cardiac arrest, has teamed up with WorldPoint, an American Heart Association distributor, to create kits that are being donated by Illinois Heart Rescue to all Illinois high schools.

The kits will be distributed to Illinois' regional offices of education and shared among local schools to help train the 700,000 Illinois high school students.

Thursday, a kit was delivered to Jones College Prep in Chicago where Claire Luning was saved by her swim coach, Mac Varilla, earlier this month.

"We wanted to help support the implementation of the Lauren Laman Law, which is an unfunded mandate, by taking the financial and training burden off Illinois schools, and decided the best way to do this would be to provide training tool kits teachers can use to not only learn how to perform CPR and use AEDs, but how to train others in the use of these lifesaving techniques. Essentially, Illinois Heart Rescue has relieved the educational and financial burdens related to CPR education for every high school in the state," said Teri Campbell, director of ILHR.

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation and automated external defibrillator training for students in all Illinois high schools was added as a requirement in all secondary schools in the state as of June 2014. Since the bill was signed, Illinois Heart Rescue has been working diligently to ensure schools have the appropriate equipment to train correctly. While creating the kits, Teri and Stephanie Clark, account manager at WorldPoint, worked very closely together ensuring requirements of the bill were supported.

"CPR and AED training in high schools is such an important initiative and while most people support it, very few have the conviction to ensure the training is the quality it should be," notes John Amato, CEO of WorldPoint. "Teri is such an incredible person. Not only is it evident that she is passionate about training, she and Illinois Heart Rescue are blazing a trail in the state of Illinois. Their mission of training as many people as possible coincides with our mission at WorldPoint which made it a project we are excited to be part of."

Each kit includes 16 durable, stackable training manikins, two AED trainers, a training DVD with two fun, exciting CPR training videos that are copied into several languages (English, Spanish, Polish, Cantonese, Mandarin and Hindi). In addition, there is a folder of educational support materials for the teachers including a pre-post test, commitment certificates, directions, key messaging and CPR handouts for students.

"Because Illinois Heart Rescue firmly believes in a 'pay-it-forward' model, we include handouts in the training kits that students can use to train their families in CPR at home," said Campbell. "We ask that every student we train, in turn, teaches five additional people how to perform CPR."

Illinois Heart Rescue is a statewide quality assurance / quality improvement project for the state of Illinois. Operating under grant funds from the Medtronic Foundation to the University of Illinois Chicago, they are tasked with doubling neurologically intact survival for victims of out of hospital cardiac arrests over a 5-year period. The project is multifocal and relies on volunteer support from pre-hospital systems, hospitals and community leaders/organizations. For more information, visit illinoisheartrescue.com.

WorldPoint is an American Heart Association distributor working with AHA training centers around the globe. WorldPoint's customers always have access to people, products and ideas that improve health care training and help them save more lives. For more information, visit www.worldpoint.com.