Womanikin Attachment Seeks to Address Gender Disparities in CPR?

When someone stops breathing, or the heart stops beating, he or she typically can survive for only 4 to 6 minutes before lack of oxygen can result in brain damage or death and over 70% of all cardiac and breathing emergencies occur in the home when a family member is present and available to help a victim.

The American Heart Association estimates that 100,000 to 200,000 lives of adults and children could be saved each year if CPR were performed early enough, however, women are 27% less likely than men to receive CPR from bystanders in public.

Research into this disparity has indicated that bystanders’ reluctance to touch the chest of a woman they don’t know might be a factor. The research, led by cardiologist Dr Hanno Tan at the University of Amsterdam, found that only 68% of women are likely to receive bystander CPR compared to 73% of men.

This is also reflected in the fact that survival from the time of the cardiac arrest to hospital admission was 34% for women compared to 37% for men. Women are also less likely to survive from admission to discharge (37% versus 55%).

Part of this disparity is because women tend to recognize that women who collapsed were having a cardiac arrest and because women tend to unequal heart attack care one admitted, with research from the UK more than 8,200 women in England and Wales could have survived their heart attacks had they simply been given the same quality of treatment as men

It has also been suggested that the traditional use of a flat-chested torso in CPR classes is a contributory factor in bystanders’ unwillingness to perform CPR on women.

In order to address this issue, New York City-based ad agency Joan Creative in collaboration with advocacy organization The United State of Women has created the Womanikin, a vest with silicon breasts that fits traditional CPR manikins.

In order to make the Womanikin as easily available as possible, the pattern to create a Womanikin attachment has been made available as an open-source download on the Womanikin website.

CPR is a vital tool that saves lives. As Sara Askew, Head of Survival for the British Heat Foundation points out, “Regardless of gender, the overall survival rate for an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is shockingly less than one in ten. Every minute that passes without CPR and defibrillation reduces the chance of survival by up to 10 percent, which is why knowing how to perform CPR is essential and doing something is always better than doing nothing.”

Learn To Save Lives

Here at Northwest Career College, we are committed to providing affordable, quality CPR Classes to the Las Vegas community. We pride ourselves on being an American Heart Association (AHA) testing center and we offer Las Vegas CPR classes designed to fit your personal needs and professional schedule. As part of our “student-focussed” approach to education we also off our CPR classes free of charge to all of our students. Call us today on (702) 403-1592 to book your CPR class and become qualified to save a life in just four hours!