Click the link to hear Tara Summers-Hermann tell the story of MEDBASICS
I never thought I would have to save my own child’s life. The truth is I didn’t want to think about it, no parent does, right? But when our son Nicholas was a toddler, he choked one day while eating lunch, and I was the only one home to help him.
After five or six abdominal thrusts, a mushy piece of potato went flying across our kitchen and Nicholas started breathing, his little blue lips turning pink again. I sat down on the floor beside his high chair, held him in my arms, and started crying . . . both of us started crying actually.
My mind went straight to the “what ifs.” What if I hadn’t been a nurse, would I have known how to save him? What if abdominal thrusts hadn’t worked, was I positive I would have remembered what to do next? What if I hadn’t been there at all? What would my babysitter’s response have been? My mother’s response? I was terrified.
If I had these fears as an RN, how scared must nonmedical parents be?
I wanted to be certain that anyone caring for Nicholas would know what to do if he choked again. I asked his grandparents to become CPR certified and tried to hire only sitters with first-aid experience. Although this helped provide some peace of mind, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I hadn’t completely solved the issue. What if the sitter forgot what she had been trained, or my mother simply froze? Then one day I was reading an article about airline safety and realized I had stumbled across the obvious solution.
The airline industry uses a two-fold approach in preparing for and handling unexpected emergencies. First, every pilot must regularly go through training that simulates catastrophic events, such as the loss of engine power during flight. Next, an instruction manual is kept in the cockpit at all times. This manual is designed to be used during an actual emergency to guide the pilots in reliable response to the situation at hand.
I started thinking that the stress a pilot feels when attempting to land a crashing airplane is probably not so unlike the stress a parent feels when responding to an unexpected medical emergency. The events are rare, extremely stressful, and make clear thinking next to impossible. The consequence of “not getting it right” is severe for both.
MEDBASICS® applies the airline industry’s safety concept to infant and toddler medical emergencies. We believe that parents and caregivers should go through training that simulates various pediatric medical emergencies. This training is available via the CPR/first-aid courses offered by the American Heart Association and other organizations. Like the airline industry, we also believe that this simulation training alone is not enough, which is why we created MEDBASICS®.
