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 Philly and beyond.
“It’s hard to do CPR…if you are tired after a few minutes, you are doing it correctly.”
Josh Glick, MD, 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.
“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 and an emergency department doctor at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, 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 percent, but in Philadelphia it is below 9 percent. The divide becomes more stark when looking at the rate of survival with a healthy brain: nationally it is 8.2 percent, in Philadelphia it’s 4.8 percent.
The disparity can be partially explained by a wide gap in the percentage of people experiencing out-of-the-hospital cardiac arrest who receive bystander CPR. Nationally, only 40 percent of the people who need bystander CPR receive it; in Philadelphia, it’s 28 percent.
“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,” said Glick.
The Mobile CPR Project is designed to cut through those barriers. It was started in 2016 by former Penn Medicine emergency physician and researcher Benjamin Abella, MD, as a community initiative under Penn’s Center for Resuscitation Science. Abella has been a mentor to Glick throughout his career, so it was only natural that Glick would take over when Abella left Penn two years ago. That’s also when the Mobile CPR Project was revived through a grant from Independence Blue Cross. The entire program fits into the back of a small sprinter van: CPR dummies, demonstration AEDs, and more. Since rebooting, the program has delivered free training to more than 200 classes, averaging between 10 and 15 classes a month.
Bringing CPR training to the people
“Whether it’s a rec league, a school, a nursing home, we meet the community where they're at,” said Cindy Sako, the program coordinator of the project.
The classes range from 30 minutes to an hour in length, and the class sizes can be as small as one person and up to nearly 400 people. The project is flexible when it comes to days of the week and times of day. Sometimes, Glick says, it might be an educational session at a middle school or a retirement home; other times it might be an informational table at an event or festival. People and organizations need only submit a request on the Mobile CPR Project website.
The effort took center court earlier in the fall as the Philadelphia 76ers partnered with Penn Medicine to donate AEDs and offer up training to the Boys & Girls Club in Wissahickon and another Boys & Girls Club in Lancaster.
Glick’s role as an emergency physician adds gravitas to the classes for people like Christy Holland, who was in the class at the Wissahickon Boys & Girls Club. She said she’s taken several classes at places where she volunteers and works, taught by firefighters, nurses, or other instructors; “this is the first time we had a doctor, specifically.”
Holland said the Mobile CPR Program training offered more details on what to do step by step, and it was the first time she was trained on an AED. The class also gave her something else: the confidence that she could save a life.
“You don’t want anyone to die, whether you know them or not, you just want to help people,” said Holland.
‘I got this.’
This sort of training falls into the bucket of skills learned with the hope of never having to use. With that in mind, the Mobile CPR Project is intentionally designed toward simplicity, so that when a crisis happens, the teaching resurfaces.
Last fall, Yvonne Brown, a school bus aide, was on a field trip when she suddenly had to apply this training to the real world. One of the adults on the trip passed out and his heart stopped beating. Brown had just taken part in a Mobile CPR Project training offered in partnership with the school district a few months prior.
“I remember they said in the class to get them on a flat surface and start performing CPR,” said Brown.
She laid the man across two seats of the bus and started chest compressions.
“It was scary, but once I got into pumping, I was like, ‘Come on, I got this,’” said Brown.
She said her mind replayed everything taught in the class. She kept up the chest compressions until paramedics showed up to take over.
“I’m grateful for the class because I learned it [CPR] so I could perform it,” Brown said. “If I didn’t know how to do it, I wouldn’t be able to try and save his life.”
Pumping people up to save lives
Arming people with the skills to save a life demands more than teaching someone to pump a person’s chest to the beat of “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees (or, if you prefer a more modern life-saving anthem, any song from a playlist recommended by the American Heart Association). It also requires a rewiring of a common fear that keeps bystanders from becoming heroes.
“The number one thing people take away is that they feel more confident to step in and help,” said Sako.
Sako said there are Good Samaritan laws on the books in all 50 states that absolve someone of blame if they injure a person while performing CPR or using an AED. She said it’s not uncommon for someone to hesitate out of fear of breaking a person’s ribs while doing chest compressions.
“You can fix a broken rib if they’re alive, but you can't fix a heart that has stopped,” said Sako.
There’s also a general fear of using an AED, like the one presented to the Boys & Girls Club by Penn Medicine and the Sixers; it will be stationed in a box in the gym. Glick passed around a pair of demonstration AEDs to the people in the class to show how they work and bust a few more myths.
“This is arguably one of the safest pieces of medical equipment out there,” Glick told the class. And even though the trainers don’t recommend it, if someone is accidentally touching the person receiving a shock from the AED, “you’re not going to get electrocuted under most circumstances.”
Glick says the ultimate goal of the Mobile CPR Project is to make training accessible, easy, and digestible.
“The mission stays the same,” said Glick. “Every single Philadelphian needs to learn know how to do CPR.”
It’s a mission with reach beyond Philadelphia, to give people the power to save lives anywhere and everywhere.
In other words: Keep on pumping.