Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Mission Statement

The AHA is a national voluntary health agency that promotes healthier living and provides the knowledge of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) through their program. The American Heart Association’s mission is: “Building healthier lives, free of cardiovascular disease, and stroke”. Because CPR is being taught ineffectively by the curriculum that AHA provides, it does not fulfill the AHA’s mission statement. CPR would be effective if the CPR program under AHA discussed about cardiovascular disease (CVD) and the issues involved around it. It is better discussing it, then not discussing it at all. CPR has been the way to help anyone who had cardiac arrest, but it has not been the most effective. First, CPR is delayed and takes a long time for

One of them that AHA promises to get rid of is cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a “heart and blood vessel disease”. Also known as heart disease. As a result of cardiovascular disease, people die and it is the “leading cause of death in the United States” (Heidenreich et al. 934). As the years go by, the disease will cost more in future years (Heidenreich et al. 938). According to research done by Paul Heidenreich and others, they stated “CVD prevalence and costs are projected to increase substantially in the future” (938). Heidenreich and others wrote the article the Forecasting the Future of Cardiovascular Disease in the United States, and the article is talking about the expected outcomes of CVD to the public and the expected money that AHA will provide to help resolve cardiovascular disease. Will it ever be solved though? People are now exposed to many fast food restaurants that are linked to obesity, and obesity is one of the causes of cardiovascular disease. AHA predicts that in 2030, “40.5 % of the US population is projected to have some form of CVD” (934). The AHA is seeking a plan to accommodate the money that is expected to come by CVD (Heidenreich 935). The money toward stopping CVD will not be effective if people are still eating badly and people do not know how to do CPR properly. In American Heart Association Response to

One article, The Problem of Poor retention of CPR discusses about the ways CPR is not taught in a standardized way. The instructors were not correcting people when they performed CPR and hands on experience by performing CPR was limited (67). Hands on experience is the way for a person to be able to perform CPR, and when instructors do not allow that in their class then the people are not learning anything. When a person rolls over with cardiac arrest, the person will not know what to do because the person had limited experience with dummies. Also, it is no point in performing CPR on a dummy if the instructor does not teach you the right way and correct your mistakes. Performing CPR to a real person will not be as effective if the person does not know how to perform CPR. The mistakes the person is performing will cause more injury to the person unconscious. As a result, the person does not survive. Instead, the person will be dead with internal bleeding from the non-correct way of performing compressions. Teaching CPR the wrong way does not help CPR to be effective when needed in a real situation. Over “35,000 deaths per year are due to sudden cardiac death”, and the people performing wrong CPR are not helping those people who are suffering (68). Some instructors teach CPR the right way which enables a person to effectively perform CPR, but most of the other instructors teach CPR the wrong way