By Repps Hudson
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
Copyright 2006 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
A co-worker slumps over his keyboard. For a minute or two, no one notices. Then someone tries to wake him, only to discover that his heart has stopped.
At this point, CPR training and the right equipment may be the only things that can save the worker’s life and ensure he is able to recover with mental faculties intact.
To be so thoroughly prepared, however, co-workers must have basic cardiopulmonary resuscitation training and be up to date on the latest techniques.
It also may be a matter of life and death that they have an automated external defibrillator, or AED, close at hand. Once the heart stops, the victim may suffer brain damage within four to six minutes and irreversible brain damage after 10 minutes if no resuscitation takes place.
Joyce Bathke, co-director of health and safety services for the St. Louis area chapter of the American Red Cross, says many area businesses have taken advantage of the Red Cross’ training programs for CPR and AEDs. It’s not that workers are dying because no one has the right training.
But, as Bathke and other experts have noted, there are persuasive reasons why managers and workers alike should be sure CPR-trained employees are on duty whenever a company is open for business.
Among them is the aging work force, with many baby boomers continuing to work into their 60s. However, Bathke and her co-director, Maxine Hepper, noted that age is no predictor of when someone may have heart trauma and need help to resume breathing before emergency medical technicians arrive. Whether workers are in their 20s or their 50s isn’t a reliable indicator of the need to be prepared.
Then there are more practical reasons. An obvious one is that the death of a worker is very hard on morale. With the mourning period and funeral, a worker’s death on the job can cut significantly into productivity. Workers upset about the death of a colleague can spend hours being distracted and helping each other through the aftermath.
Bathke said training can require several hours by each employee, during normal hours, after work or on weekends. Red Cross training for CPR-AED is 6 1/2 hours.
Some employees don’t want to give up their off hours, and few managers want to require employees to learn the life-saving secrets of CPR. Some employees are squeamish, others don’t think they should be forced.
And, said Stacie Owen, a lawyer with McMahon Berger, which represents management in management-labor issues, companies cannot require that employees learn CPR because of the liability risk.
“There are liability issues,” she said, referring to a worker wanting to be helpful who applies the technique incorrectly or may not know the latest information.
What about incentives, like compensatory time, a small, one-time bonus or recognition that catches the attention of peers? For managers, why not an expectation that one should know CPR or arrange schedules of CPR-trained employees to be sure that a workplace is never without people who can save a life?
A workplace could have a dozen people trained in CPR-AED but, for some reason, none is working a shift on a particular day. A prudent approach might be to schedule trained employees with every shift.
Bathke said some organizations aren’t focused on the need for CPR training. Without a suddenly ill worker to make the need apparent, training and preparedness may get little attention because of the cost in employees’ time and for the defibrillators.
The latter can run between $1,600 and $3,000 each, said Bathke, and should be distributed throughout the workplace so they are no more than two minutes away from workers.
Managers may shrug off training, she said, “but when they have someone in (a bad) situation, they get interested.”