RIPLEY, W.Va. — “Jackson County just got a whole lot safer today.” The words of Kevin Pauley of the American Heart Association as CPR training was held Monday for students about to graduate from Ripley and Ravenswood High Schools.
The training comes as a result of a generous donation by UniCare to provide more than 400 CPR kits to students in the county which are designed to help train more people to perform CPR in the event of cardiac arrest.
“Most cardiac arrests happen in the home and outside of the hospital,” said Pauley. “The rural nature of our state makes it such that sometimes EMS can’t make it to someone suffering cardiac arrest for 30 to 45 minutes. The simple fact is for every minute you don’t get help, your chances of survival decrease by ten percent. Within five minutes if you don’t get help, you’ve only got a 50/50 chance of making it out alive.”
The Heart Association however says a new state law is helping to improve those odds. During 2015 the legislature passed a bill which requires a CPR training course before students can graduate from high school in West Virginia.
“The more people we have that know CPR, that’s more boots on the ground should you go into cardiac arrest,” Pauley explained.
Each student in Jackson County takes home the CPR kit following their certification and will be able to use that kit to train others in their home on how to perform CPR in an emergency situation.
“We teach in the class the chest compression should stick to the beat of ‘Staying Alive,'” Pauley said. “It’s the only time in history Disco could ever save a life.”