AHA Employee Helps Save a Life With CPR

With the release of our 2015 Guidelines Update for CPR and ECC last week, we stressed that people should continue to jump in quickly to give CPR to speed up the rescue of cardiac arrest victims. The guidelines, published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, highlight how quick action, proper training, use of technology and coordinated efforts can increase survival from cardiac arrest.

We have a staff member within our Emergency Cardiovascular Care (ECC) department who is a testament to the importance of immediate bystander action.  Jennifer Zanganeh, who works as an ECC Account Manager in our Los Angeles office, jumped in to help save a young boy recently at a roller skating rink. Within seconds, the boy started responding. “When I felt his heartbeat … it was indescribable,” Zanganeh said of the mid-September rescue.

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Suzanne Sands (left), Jennifer’s supervisor in Western States Affiliate, presents the Heartsaver Hero award to Jennifer on October 15th.

The boy was lucky that a pair of lifesavers jumped in to perform CPR. It’s often not the case in out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, but it makes a huge difference, doubling or tripling the odds of survival. That’s a promising stat considering there are more than 326,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests occur in the U.S.

It’s always amazing when a life is saved using CPR. And we are all especially proud when that life is saved by one of our own. As Jennifer’s story illustrates, it’s crucial that all of us stay up to date on our CPR training. If you haven’t taken a refresher class in a while, please do so, and please encourage your colleagues, friends and families to do the same because you’ll never know when you may need to jump in and save a life.

Please read the full story here on our blog.heart.org site.

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