Posted by Tanmay G.
As the last week of classes starts tomorrow morning, the realization that I won't be coming back to Hopkins next semester is just finally starting to set in. This weekend was Spring Fair, an annual campus festival with food vendors, arts & crafts stalls and carnival rides. It was actually the first time in the past four years that we went all 3 days (Friday-Sunday) with only minimal rain (a quick downpour on Saturday evening before the Roots' concert, but nothing during the day)!
I've been a member of HERO, the campus EMS unit, for the past 3.5 years, and when I was on the Board of Directors last fall, we decided we wanted to organize a free community CPR training session to give back to our campus community. We set out planning the event, hoping to train about 90 Hopkins students, faculty and staff in CPR and AED use.We realized how important it was for people on campus to know what to do in case of an emergency - even though we have a crew of three EMT's on call 24/7, it's vital that bystanders know how to call for help and provide initial care before we make it to a patient. We applied for a grant from the Alumni Association, which gives out over $75,000 in grant money to student groups each year, and also worked closely with the University's Occupational Health office and the Baltimore City Fire Department to setup and organize the class. Over the past few weeks, a number of the instructors that teach our First Responder courseeach semester got certified as American Heart Association CPR instructors, and along with other HERO members, put together all the details to run the course.
This weekend, we taught three CPR/AED training sessions. On Thursday morning, three of us checked out a van from the Office of Student Life (vans are available to all students groups for a minimal per-mile fee) and drove down to the Medical Campus to pick up CPR training manikans and other training supplies from the Occupational Health office, and then headed to the Baltimore City Public Safety Training Center to pick up additional supplies from the City Fire Department. On Friday morning, as Spring Fair vendors were setting up their stalls on the freshmen quad, we setup our classroom in a large multipurpose room in one of the freshmen dorms. We taught a class on Friday afternoon, one on Saturday morning and another Saturday afternoon. We trained about 90 students in CPR and the use of Automated Extrenal Defibrillators - skills that could help save a life if someone on campus were to go into cardiac arrest.
All our instructors and TA's had a great time teaching our fellow students as well as a few faculty and staff members. The students seemed to enjoy the class as well, and if an unfortunate situtation were to ever come up where one of them had to use the skills we taught them, I hope they'll be ready to act.
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