When someone’s heart stops beating, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) can save their life. Cardiac arrest can be caused by many different things like heart disease, drugs, blood loss, electric shock, and lack of oxygen. CPR delivers vital blood and oxygen back to the body’s organs when the heart can’t pump for itself. CPR is easy to learn and easy to remember when you need it most – so why should choosing a class be any harder?
CPR classes come in many shapes and sizes for all kinds of people. This guide will help you figure out how to choose the right CPR class for your needs.
The Options
CPR/AED
CPR increases the chance of survival after cardiac arrest by a huge margin – but only about half of the people who go into cardiac arrest outside of the hospital get CPR before first responders show up. There’s a huge gap between the people who might need CPR at home, at school, at work, or in public and those who can perform it. That’s where general CPR/AED courses come in.
The general CPR/AED course is designed to prepare all types of people to perform CPR in the real world. It’s geared towards people like parents, industrial workers, personal trainers, or any other member of the general public without a background in health care. In this course, you’ll learn everything you need to provide high-quality CPR on infants, children, and adults, how to respond to choking, and how to use an AED, an automated external defibrillator.
This course is great for parents and babysitters, workers, or anyone who wants to be more prepared in an emergency.
CPR/AED & First Aid
The general CPR/AED & First Aid course offers a deeper dive than the CPR/AED course alone. Once again, this course is designed for those without a health care background who are interested in learning how to respond to common emergencies. It includes the same CPR and AED training, but with an extra module that goes even deeper.
With first aid, you’ll learn the first steps for dealing with common injuries and illnesses like seizures, strokes, fractures, burns, and more. This course prepares individuals to respond to a wide array of emergencies in all age groups.
This course is great for parents and babysitters, workers, or anyone who wants to be more prepared in an emergency.
BLS: CPR for Health Care Workers
BLS stands for Basic Life Support. Unlike the general CPR/AED courses, the BLS courses are designed for those who work in the health care and dental fields. In a BLS course, you’ll still learn how to recognize choking and cardiac arrest and how to respond, but the curriculum is instead geared towards the health care environment. BLS for Healthcare Providers can be a standalone CPR/AED course or you can take it with first aid.
BLS courses are recommended for anyone working in the health care field who is required to have CPR/AED certification.
EMSA: Pediatric Certification
This special course is geared specifically towards certified professionals who work with children: daycare workers, preschool teachers, and other professional childcare workers. Specially designed to meet the requirements of the Emergency Medical Services Authority of California, this course will teach you skills to manage a variety of common emergencies, illnesses, and injuries in children and infants.
This 8-hour course offers a deep dive: you’ll not only learn CPR and AED use, but gain an in-depth understanding of what it takes to respond to pediatric emergencies. You’ll learn how to make safety checklists, how to pick up on the signs of illness in children, the best ways to interact with kids of different ages, and more.
This course is specifically designed for certified childcare providers who are required to have EMSA certification.
Final Tips
There are a lot of options out there to learn CPR. Here are a few final tips to help you find the right one:
#1: Check to see if you need a specific certification. If you need a certification for work, you probably need to take a specific course like BLS or EMSA.
#2: Choose a course that suits your setting. If you work around a lot of people, with kids, with machinery, and so on, you might want to consider taking a CPR/AED course with first aid, too.
Once you’ve decided which course is right for you, head over to our course calendar to find one that fits into your schedule!
