Wow. There are different types of training. I am not going to get into all of the different types because you need to determine what you need yourself, so you’ll need to do a bit of research. Once you know what you need, shop around and find out the best one that will work for you. I just want to share with you some information that you might not think about when shopping around.
I took my first CPR/AED/FA training a year ago. The certification for CPR/AED-Adult lasted one year. That certification for the Standard First Aid lasts three years. I think it was an excellent course. It was long, it was 7 or 8 hours. But the instructor had been doing it a long time and he was very good. He was entertaining and injected just the right amount of humor so as not to let the class be boring or to have us falling asleep.
I would recommend this long, extensive class for anyone that is getting certified for the very first time. It was very detailed and we did a lot of practical practice. We used dummies to do CPR, plus each group practiced with an AED. Then we practice basic first aid on each other.
I also liked this class because it was really close to my house in San Jose.
This latest class I took was CPR/AED and the certification lasts for two years! Yay! I love that! It will be perfect timing because that is when I will need a recert in First Aid.
This was the perfect re-cert class. It moved much more quickly and there was not as much practice on the dummy. Right now the ratio is 30 compression to 2 ventilations performed 5 times in two minutes. Doing that three or four times is enough. It takes a good amount of pressure to get that dummy’s chest to click.
With this class I think I got a little bit of a different idea about the whole thing. The first class I took was with an instructor. I don’t think he actually ever performed CPR. Tonight the teacher was a fire chief (I think that is what he said). He had a long list of in the field experience. He had even worked as an EMT. He has actually done CPR and used and AED. So a few of the questions actually made him pause. You could tell he had an answer, but he was not going to just blurt out the truth, but he wasn’t going to lie about it either.
Both teachers were great, just in different ways. It was just really interesting to get information from someone who had actually performed CPR and used an AED. I honestly don’t remember my last instruction including the information that it would be “crunchy”. The amount of pressure required to compress someone’s chest to get the heart to force it into pumping blood just might break bones. He said it probably would and it was ok. I thought that was really important to hear, because I think I might have backed off from pressing as firmly as they are now saying you need to, if I had not been told that bones will break. I thought that was invaluable information. Need to know kind of stuff.
CPR/AED/FA training is one of those things, like insurance, that you hope you never, ever, ever need. I hope it works out that I never need to exercise my knowledge. It is good to have it, I just don’t ever wanna use it. Are you certified? Do you have any stories to tell about a certification class you have taken?
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