The Mobile CPR Project takes lifesaving training on the road
When cardiac arrest hits outside the hospital, the odds of survival are long. The Mobile CPR Project is driving to increase those odds with free trainings all around Philadelphia and beyond.
2 min. read
“It’s hard to do CPR … if you are tired after a few minutes, you are doing it correctly.”
Josh Glick, associate professor of clinical emergency medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, paced around half court of the gym at the Wissahickon Boys & Girls Club in Philadelphia. Circled by more than a dozen people who were practicing chest compressions on CPR dummies, it would have been easy to mistake him for a basketball coach as he offered up support and direction.
Josh Glick instructing a course on hands-only CPR at the Boys & Girls Club in Wissahickon.
(Image: Courtesy of Penn Medicine News)
“Good, good, good … excellent. Keep on pumping.”
He crouched down and guided one man’s form.
“Get over the top, keep your arms straight.”
The training is just one of the classes the Mobile CPR Project has held across the region Penn Medicine serves, this one taught in partnership with the Philadelphia 76ers. Hands-only CPR (short for cardiopulmonary resuscitation), delivered through steady chest compressions, is a way to maintain blood flow and deliver oxygen to the brain when someone’s heart stops beating. Since the Mobile CPR Project was revived two years ago with fresh funding after a hiatus, Glick and his team have crisscrossed the Philadelphia region—and beyond—training more than 5,000 people in CPR and how to use an automated external defibrillator (AED), a device which shocks a heart back to beating properly in rhythm. Glick, the medical director of the project, says the training is needed, especially around Philadelphia.
The survival rate for outside-of-the-hospital cardiac arrest nationally is a little more than 10%, but in Philadelphia it is below 9%. The divide becomes more stark when looking at the rate of survival with a healthy brain: nationally it is 8.2%, in Philadelphia it’s 4.8%.
“When we look at why people aren’t trained in CPR, there are really three barriers. The first is time, the second is cost, and then the third is access,” says Glick.
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