CPR demonstration planned at MBM school
EQT’s ‘Have a Heart…Save a Life’ Program will hold a kickoff event and student demonstration at 10 a.m. Tuesday at Margaret Bell Miller Middle School.
“Have a Heart…Save a Life” teaches seventh-grade students how to perform the lifesaving skills of cardiopulmonary resuscitation in about 22 minutes.
Supported by EQT Foundation, the charitable affiliation of EQT Corp., and using the American Heart Association’s Family and Friends CPR Anytime training course, once students learn the correct way to administer CPR, they use the kit to teach their family and friends.
The EQT Foundation has committed more than $1 million to the program since it began in 2007, providing training for 31,402 students and more than 100 thousand of their family members and friends. The program provides the lifesaving skills of CPR to students and residents in 28 counties throughout Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky.
This year’s “Have a Heart…Save a Life” program will train students in four Greene County middle schools.
“At EQT, safety is a core value for our employees and for the communities where we live and work,” said Charlene Petrelli, EQT Foundation president. “Knowing how to perform CPR can protect all of us in the event of an accident or illness. We take pride in being able to teach our neighbors how to help themselves in the case of an emergency and – whether it involves local students, their families, or their friends – is a natural extension of our commitment to making safety our top priority.”
Anyone can learn CPR and everyone should. Unfortunately, 70 percent of Americans say they feel helpless to act during a cardiac emergency because they do not know what to do.
“Survival rates drop about 10 percent for every minute that goes by without CPR intervention and the life you save with CPR could most likely be someone you know because 88 percent of cardiac arrest happen close to home,” said Michele Bolles, senior vice president of health strategies for the American Heart Association’s Great Rivers Affiliate.