The Importance of Teaching Pulmonary Resuscitation Skills in Colleges (Essay Sample)

The Importance of Teaching Pulmonary Resuscitation Skills in Colleges Name Institution The Importance of Teaching Pulmonary Resuscitation Skills in Colleges "He could have died." Those were the chilling words of one of the paramedics who had responded to my emergency call after Pop had collapsed in the living room. Recollecting the events of that night, I'm now fully convinced he could have actually died had it not been for our neighbor old Mrs. Hassan, a widow and retired nurse living on pension, who wobbled into our living room a few moments after Mom had let out a shrieking cry that cut through the night like a siren. After asking what had happened, and after I had hysterically babbled an explanation, she promptly put her walking stick aside, kneeled down beside Pop, and did what I could never have thought of in the circumstances; she administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, commonly known as "the kiss of life," and then began compressing his chest repeatedly. And indeed, he responded by moving his eyes and starting to breath normally. When I went to bed that night I thought, I'm a university graduate, and I can't help a person who had fainted. It is instances like these, emergency cases of people experiencing cardiac arrests, heart failures, and other life-threatening conditions at homes, in colleges and school playgrounds, that underscore the importance of making first-aid courses such as cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) part of the college s curriculum. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation is an emergency-situation procedure for manually and temporarily sustaining brain function in a person who had experienced cardiac arrest or heart failure until further and specialized measures could be administered to restore spontaneous breathing and blood circulation (National Heart Foundation of Australia, 2011). Implementing CPR curriculums in colleges and other institutions of higher learning is supported by data showing that colleges admit students with different medical histories, which include chronic and life threatening conditions like cardiac arrests and respiratory failure (The Joint Commission, 2011). At the same time, colleges without in-campus medical schools are usually out of immediate reach from the nearest hospitals, which makes it necessary for teachers and students to have knowledge of CPR and other first-aid skills to enable them handle emergency cases effectively (Lotfi, et al., 2007; Cave, et al., 2011). Further considering that non-boarding college students often stay in far flung places away from college health facilities, CPR training will equip them with life-saving skills that could come in handy if an emergency occurs at odd hours, such at night. Creutzfeldt et al. (2013) cite many cases where students have saved the lives of roommates and class mates by administering first-aid in situations that could have ended tragically as a result of delayed medical attention. In conclusion, research findings suggest that doctors are rarely the first respondents to home and school emergency cases like cardiac arrest, heart or respirator...