Nashville First Aid and CPR was established to meet the growing emergency training needs of Nashville and surrounding areas.
The founder, Bill Kelleher, has a great passion for Emergency Medical Services and for teaching the public lifesaving skills:
“I was an 18 year old Freshman in college when I had to use CPR skills for the first time that I had learned as a Lifeguard throughout my teen years. On April 20, 1990, I was in Tae Kwon Do class. That evening, we were having belt testing. A 22 year old classmate of mine had just finished his belt testing a few minutes prior and then suddenly collapsed. I went to his side immediately.
He did not have a pulse and was not breathing, so I started CPR. Another classmate joined me, and we continued CPR until the rescue squad arrived. At the time Basic Life Support ambulances were not allowed to have defibrillators, and the nearest hospital was nearly a half hour away. Unfortunately, our classmate did not make it. I remember the floor of the ER waiting room at the hospital being all blurry from tears in my eyes.
I could have let this get me down– live the rest of my life with my head down, crawled up in a shell, but I decided to do something about it. That same day, I joined the University Rescue Squad where I went to school and got into the first EMT course I could. From there I progressed to Advanced EMT and also became a CPR instructor and EMT Instructor.
I went on to Paramedic school after finishing my degree, and by the mid nineties, I was part of an instructor group that lead a pilot project in NY State to bring defib skills to the Certified First Responder level. We trained over 900 Buffalo Firefighters in under 2 years to get them online. The few weeks their defib program was online, they had 6 code saves walk out of the hospital alive because of it. That was a very rewarding experience.
benefits and rewards
The New England Journal of Medicine published a study last summer comparing patients who received early bystander CPR prior to ambulance arrival with those who received no early CPR.
The group who received early CPR had a survival rate that was nearly 3x higher. So please, even if you don’t take a certification class with us or another provider, at least learn how to do compressions only CPR. Here is a brief video from the AHA on how to do it:
“Learning CPR skills is so important. The person’s life you save could be that of a friend or a loved one– at the very least, the person you save is someone else’s friend or loved one.”
