New Prairie HOSA will receive a grant from the Health Care Foundation of Laporte for six AEDs, four temperature control boxes for AEDs in outside sport facilities, and for 75 HOSA students to be CPR trained.
The New Prairie HOSA team has been pushing for more AEDS in the school and sport facilities. The current AEDs are hard to find and the ones in its sport facilities are locked up and not accessible to the public.
The awareness campaign will be for students and staff to be better trained in knowing how to assist incase of an emergency.
Tonya Aerts, who is the biomed teacher and HOSA advisor says “the ultimate goal is for a heart safe campus”.
HOSA will talk to all the sports teams at the beginning of their seasons to train them in knowing how to assist in case of an emergency and to know how to be able to identify warning signs of cardiac arrest in themselves and in teammates.
“We can’t easily solve school shootings, we can’t easily solve the opioid crisis, but we can solve this,” Aerts said.
Out of ten randomly surveyed students, eight of which play sports, only three know where AEDs are located and only one person knows how to use them.
This proves that most students in our school wouldn’t know how to respond in an emergency and could benefit from a form of training on how to use the AEDs.
This effort is not only focused on New Prairie. HOSA will provide information and tools to Laporte schools, schools throughout Indiana, and schools throughout the country. Why not just New Prairie school corporation? “Because everyone has a heart,” Aerts stated.
Another goal of HOSA is to maintain the AEDs that we currently have. AEDs need regular maintenance to assure the battery is working properly and the pads are not expired. Neglecting the maintenance of of these life-saving devices could be catastrophic in a medical emergency.
“We can’t easily solve school shootings, we can’t easily solve the opioid crisis, but we can solve this,” Aerts said.
Aerts added that many think this would be a typical thing to have in a first responders car, however it is not. Most police cars don’t have AEDs which makes it harder for them to control emergency situations without calling an ambulance, which takes time. HOSA participated in a recent 5k to raise money to place AEDs in police cars.