Comanche County Memorial Hospital has a new, high-tech way of making sure their health care professionals are trained to do CPR properly. That’s why the hospital recently rolled out the Resuscitation Quality Improvement (RQI) program. It’s their new way of doing CPR training.
Leann Legako, an RN educator at CCMH, said instead of going through training every two years, it’ll be done quarterly.
“This RQI program does it in low doses in high frequencies,” Legako said.
She said skills can decline if people don’t need to use their training often.
“That’s why we felt it was very important to do something better,” Legako said. “We were doing what we thought we could do at the time, every two-year certification, and we now realized that the better program is to do it in low doses more frequently. That way, you’re showing competency, not just that you have a card every two years, but you are totally confident when we need you to be competent.”
With the RQI program, everybody at CCMH, who has an American Heart Association credential, will have to do a few hours of training every three months. Health care professionals will have items on a to-do list like online tests and practicing CPR on a mannequin.
“It will give you immediate feedback as to how well you’re doing, what you can do to make it better, if you need to increase pressure, if you need to increase your speed,” she said. “It’s very skill-oriented in that it will tell you what you need to do better. Before, it was just an instructor or someone who is not really trained on how deep or how fast. It was subjective. This is very controlled, and everybody will be doing it correctly by the end of the session.”
She says they’re not required to do more training than before – but it’s just more spread out.
“It’s definitely been proven to improve your resuscitation outcomes,” she said. “So that you’re doing quality CPR. CPR in a code situation has been shown to be the one thing that can save your life. It has to be done correctly in order to do that.”
Bringing this to the hospital is something Legako has been working on for five years now. She said it couldn’t have been done without the CCMH Foundation and the hospital administration seeing this as a need.
“I’m so excited to have this up and running,” Legako said. “It’s just so exciting to be doing it better. I’ve always just wanted us to be the best, and I think we’re going to be the best in southwest Oklahoma. Especially at resuscitation.”
She said there will be four stations set up around the hospital for people to log in and do their training.