MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (WTVF) — You trust your child's teacher to provide an education. What you may not know: some are also trained to save your child's life. State law requires every public school in Tennessee to have at least one AED (automated external defibrillator), an emergency plan, and to practice it once a year.
NewsChannel 5’s Carrie Sharp witnessed a surprise drill at Siegel High School in Rutherford County. Angel Carter, a nurse with Monroe Carell Junior Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, oversaw the exercise. Armed with a timer and checklist, she was watching for very specific actions.
“I'm looking for immediate CPR, and I'm also looking for immediate use of the AED,” Carter said.
The school's resource officers and Rutherford County EMS were also in on the plan, as the school nurse set everything in motion.
“We have a Code Blue in the cafeteria, Code Blue in the cafeteria,” the teachers were alerted.
Even in a drill, the seconds waiting for help seem to tick by more slowly. But within one minute of the call, three teachers arrived at the school’s cafeteria with an AED in hand and started CPR on the dummy patient. The first shock by the AED was delivered in less than three minutes. This team trains as if it were the real thing because they know it could be.
“There was a 16-year-old that was saved last year at Station Camp High School. He was in class when he collapsed. There was a 16-year-old saved this summer at a Murfreesboro baseball field,” said Carter. “The common thread in all of these saves is that someone knew how to recognize it; someone knew CPR and started it right away, and there was an AED accessible, and someone knew how to use it.”
The Siegel High School team checked all the boxes and passed the test wherein training and seconds matter.
Carter said the survival rate of a sudden cardiac arrest is just 10%. But the immediate use of CPR and an AED can double or triple that. Some new studies show that when an athlete is the patient, the survival rate is as high as 89%.
Carter is part of the Project ADAM team at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital. Project ADAM is a national organization that works to get AEDs in more places and trains people to use them. It is named after Adam Lemel, a 17-year-old Whitefish Bay, WI high school student who collapsed and died from sudden cardiac arrest while playing basketball. To find out more about the middle Tennessee chapter, click here.
