Life & Safety with Jimmy Rios
Welcome to Life & Safety with Jimmy Rios! Get ready to dive into a world where safety meets storytelling! Drawing from his rich background as a former firefighter, EMT and safety expert, Jimmy brings you straight into the heart of safety and emergency preparedness. Episodes feature easy-to-understand tips, real-life stories, and interviews with experts, all designed to help you protect yourself, your business, and those you care about.
Whether it's advice on navigating everyday safety challenges or insights into the latest in health and safety trends, let this podcast educate and entertain you. Join Jimmy and level-up your safety knowledge with engaging discussions that could one day save a life.
Life & Safety with Jimmy Rios
Breaking the Silence: Bridging the Gender Gap in CPR for Women
Join us as we expose a chilling reality that's costing lives: the gender gap in CPR delivery. Brace yourself for a hard-hitting conversation that shatters the silence on why women are less likely to receive bystander CPR during cardiac emergencies. We're digging deep into the statistics that paint a dire picture for women's heart health, and the societal barriers that have created a grim survival rate for women suffering from heart attacks. Our dialogue goes beyond the numbers, confronting the fears and biases that may deter people from stepping in to help a woman in need.
In a twist that combines ingenuity with a dash of humor, we explore groundbreaking approaches to CPR training tailored for women. From the quirky yet crucial step of utilizing drag queen chest plates on mannequins to our collaboration with a mechanical engineer aimed at crafting anatomically correct CPR training tools, we're on the frontlines of a much-needed revolution in life-saving education. We're not just talking about change; we're actively forging paths to ensure that when it comes to saving a life, gender doesn't dictate the odds of survival. Join us on this journey of innovation, inclusivity, and the imperative to equip every person with the knowledge to act in an emergency, regardless of who is in need.
Life Safety Associates specializes in emergency response training for corporate ERT Teams. We help businesses create competent and confident first responders who are ready to handle unexpected emergencies. For more information you find us @lifesafetyassoc or email@lifesafety.com.
We are live-ish.
Jimmy Rios:I am alive. I know you can't see me, but I'm laying on the table, head in my hand, going what the F? But what's happening? It's your boy and your girl, megan's, with me today. Brought back Megan, she finally took some time off school aka itka, it's spring break, aka she's not sick doing 700 other things on her days off and actually came in to hang out with us today. What's our topic today? Megan?
Megan:CPR and specifically how it affects women.
Jimmy Rios:CPR and women. Okay, so I'm looking over. Megan has her notes out. Uh, lots, holy shit, he had a lot of notes.
Jimmy Rios:I didn't realize it was that much, okay, um well, I feel strongly about the topic you as you should, as you should, and life safety being a woman-owned company, you know, being a husband, being a father to a daughter, having a mom, a sister, sister-in-law you know I should feel more strongly about this too, and actually I do, and it's been kind of our crusade, I guess, for last year or so, maybe a year and a half, to get this topic out there more. More people need to be talking about this, more people need to be educated on this, and I'm actually pretty proud of how we advocate here at Life Safety for this. So yeah, megan, I think you have some questions there or some stats. Let's go through your stats real quick and then we'll kind of talk about it a little more.
Megan:Yeah for sure. So one of the questions that I always ask my classes when I start a CPR class is who dies more often of heart attacks men or women? I get varied results, but a lot of the time people say men. In fact, men have more heart attacks, but women die more often of them. Cardiovascular disease is actually the number one killer for women. There have been more deaths related to cardiovascular issues in women than there have been from all forms of cancer combined. A lot of times people don't realize that, and so it gets overlooked.
Megan:A study showed that only 39% of women received bystander CPR, compared to 45% of men that received bystander CPR. That's a 6% difference where they didn't even try. For the women, men have a 23% higher chance of survival of a cardiac event than women, which is not a great statistic. As a woman, I would like to survive cardiac events.
Megan:There's a couple of reasons for this. One of the big ones is people don't receive care because rescuers are scared of accusations. You know sexual assault, accusations of inappropriately touching the person. You know, for CPR you have to put your hands on their chest and for proper, high quality CPR you have to bear the person's chest. I mean you have to remove their shirt. A lot of people are uncomfortable doing that for a woman in public. And then another reason that women don't receive as good care is because people believe that women are less likely to have cardiovascular problems and they are more likely to over-dramatize the events. So people don't believe the woman that they're actually having chest pain or they try to downplay it and say, oh, it's probably not that bad, to the point where it's too late and the woman can't be saved.
Jimmy Rios:So do you think that is people are being judgy towards a female? Or do you think that's the fact that society has put all of the pressure on women that they have to take care of everybody? The whole world sits on their shoulders and they can't take that break, which is kind of where I lean. I know in my household, when the wife is down with sickness or something like that, the whole ship goes down. It happened again this weekend when she was gone Me and the boy barely kept the house afloat. So yeah, so I mean, I always kind of think that and I always ask that too, you know, in my classes, like what do you think? What are your thoughts on?
Megan:that. I don't know. I think it's a split. I definitely think that society as a whole tends to downplay women's issues a little bit more, but I do think that a lot of it is that women try to push past it. You know, I was raised by a single mom. My mom definitely put aside her issues, her medical issues, to take care of me. My mom has a genetic thyroid issue that got majorly, majorly out of hand when I was a small one because she was so busy working about me and taking care of me that she didn't take the time to take care of herself. And I think that's a big one for women, especially mothers, especially single mothers is, you know, they push to take care of everybody else and everybody else and their health and just kind of takes a back seat, which is not great, not the best, not the best, not the best.
Jimmy Rios:So I kind of cut you off there on some of your notes. Did you hit everything on there?
Megan:Yeah, just basically, how can we help address this issue? What can we do to sort of make this better?
Jimmy Rios:Well, I think some of the things we need to do to be better about this is one, just talk about it, just having a conversation, and I think that I would like to think that we are one of the leading companies that are doing that. I don't really know anybody else that's doing it. One is, we need to start putting stuff out there for training so we can desynthetize things, if it's jackets or shirts on mannequins breast, you know, fake breast is something that we've looked into. We actually got the idea from one of our clients, after she heard one of these stats and they bought drag queen chest plates as fake breasts that we slipped over the mannequins. They tend to work pretty good and I decided, you know, because they bought them for them, so when we did classes for them, they could do that and these are available. When you schedule classes, you can ask. Uh, just for to get more realistic, I bought them and it was quite the interesting conversation.
Jimmy Rios:I uh, apparently our contact that bought them first bought went through the supply house. Supply house sounds like they did it all online through emails. So when I call to ask because, to be frank, I didn't know what size breast to do it, or cup size or anything like that. So I was kind of just shooting from the hip, so I called them and I said this is what I'm looking to do. You have two sizes that I think will work on your website. How do you come up with it? And the nice man on the other side uh, how do I say this? Basically said okay, basically take your mannequin and measure it around. And I said, okay, this is the inches around. And he said, okay, it's gonna be this size yeah, I want to jump in here really quick.
Megan:I was here for that conversation listening in like a fly on the wall and I got to say it was.
Megan:I was in tears, laughing. The poor salesman had no idea what was happening. Jimmy was trying to explain, like you know, that we teach CPR and we want to get, you know, a rest plate to help put on the mannequin to help teach about women's CPR, and the poor guy had no idea what we were talking about. They're like you want to do what with our what Sorry, again what. And just he could not wrap his head around what we were trying to do, which, to be fair, is not necessarily, we're not necessarily their demographic that they sell to, you know, a safety company. But oh man.
Jimmy Rios:So, yeah, once we kind of got on the same page, I asked the salesperson I said so flat out like have you ever had this before or is this the strangest? He goes this is the strangest thing I've ever dealt with and I've been selling these supplies. What do you say? Like 20 years or something like that, like really long time. I'm like 20 or 30 years and he's like I've never had this question before. And then he turned on that british accent I don't know if you remember that and he goes it's bloody brilliant. And're like where did that come from? And he goes yeah, I try to hide my accent because I'm from like the northeast or something like that. We're like okay, like that's weird.
Jimmy Rios:But we're already on this strange train of talking about breast and CPR mannequins and why nobody wants to touch boobies and all kinds of stuff. And he asked he promised if we would take pictures of the mannequins with the breast. And we did and he sent back it's brilliant, they're not going to last. I don't know if I shared that email with you or not. No, and I said well, why aren't they going to last? He said because that's not, they're not going to last. I don't know if I shared that email with you or not. No, and I said well, why aren't they going to last? He said because that's not what they're designed for. I think the exact words were they're not designed to be played with, they're designed to be worn.
Megan:Which, to be fair, they are sort of. You know, there's that puckering in the middle now.
Jimmy Rios:Yes, We'll go with puckering. I like that.
Megan:I was gonna say the wearing where your hand goes and it's probably a more accurate description.
Jimmy Rios:Yeah and it's definitely pressing uh one of the breasts away. It's kind of ripping it away a little bit, but it's working on that. Um, I actually have a buddy that we talked uh over the holidays with who designs and manufactures different things with plastics like that. He's a mechanical engineer, owns his own engineering firm and fabrication shop that we're going to be doing a collaboration with here pretty, pretty soon, and somebody paid him to make a chest plate for, like a female warrior spartan costume thing. So he has the mold. We just need to go and make sure it's the right kind of a thing and kind of work it out a little bit more, and he's going to hopefully start mass producing those things so we can use them some more for our mannequins and or maybe start selling them so we can get this out there a little more.
Megan:Yeah, that would be great. I mean, one of the big issues is the reason that we had to go to a drag queen supplier is because this isn't something that's commercially available. One of the companies that sells mannequins for CPR oh, I'm blanking on the name, preston Preston just recently came out with an add on that you can sort of clip onto the mannequin, but I got to say they are not realistic. It's definitely a step in the right direction, but I think some bigger strides need to be made really going to prepare people to do CPR on a woman, having, you know, foam things that are not at all.
Jimmy Rios:Would you say they look like padding from a bra or from a swimsuit or something like that.
Megan:That is accurate. It's like the insert that you have from like, like you said, a swimsuit or a bra. It's not.
Jimmy Rios:Yeah, they're kind of weird right.
Megan:Yeah, I wouldn't say that it prepares you at all. But speaking of that, let's talk about doing CPR on women. How is it different from doing CPR on a man?
Jimmy Rios:It's not. It's not different. You're still pressing on her chest, you're still pressing on the sternum, you're still doing your thing. The only real thing is, when you do CPR on a female is more people tend to watch just because they're in shock. I think that you got to do more, better crowd control things like that, especially day and age now where everybody has a phone, everybody's trying to get likes, everybody's trying to get follows, so that's kind of a mess. Other than that, I mean it is definitely more traumatic too.
Jimmy Rios:Usually, uh, with a woman having cpr before I'm done on them, because people are going to be around. Uh, it's also society weirdness of we're going to take care of the female more than anything, things like like that, and then children, so people are always just going to be more involved. Other than that, I mean physiologically, we're still pumping 2 1⁄2 inches, 30 and 2 if you're giving breaths hard and fast, so to speak, and just trying to get CPR done until that AED gets there. No difference really with an AED. They're no difference really with an AD. Depending on how large the woman is, you might have to move a breast or something like that, but other than that, it's business as usual, depending on how big the man is, you might have to move a breast or a roll or something, I don't know. You've got to get in there, you've got to get it done. Other than that, just go.
Megan:Go, go, go, go go. Another really common question that I get is do you have to remove the person's bra if they're wearing one?
Jimmy Rios:yeah, how do you answer that?
Jimmy Rios:I say yeah 100, you gotta move it. Maybe it's a front class where there's an underwire there, something like that. You're not gonna have to press on it and you're not gonna get back steps, so you gotta remove it. And the ad is coming anyways. And you're not going to get back steps, so you got to remove it and the AED is coming anyway. So you might as well just do it all in one. You know, swoop if you will, if not, you're just going to keep spinning your wheels and going all over the place.
Jimmy Rios:Yeah, one of the questions I always get is what happens if you don't do it, especially with an AED? I always get is what happens if you don't do it, especially with an AED? And I always go back to the Mythbusters video segment where they did the myths and where they actually set the bra on fire because it arced to the metal underwire, because the pads weren't perfectly on. And, to be fair, the pads that they used were spatulas because nobody would let them test with a real AED, so they had to make their own. And I get that liability reasons, but it was still pretty eye-opening to see that kind of shock and start the brawn fire.
Jimmy Rios:Also, to be fair, it arced to a nipple ring and it blew the anodizing off the dumbbell for the ballistic gel they were using and it melted. I believe they said it was six inches or so, which they said would have been like a D-cup-breasted female burned, third-degree burned to their bone, to their ribs, so it basically would have melted their breast off. Basically Not fun, no, yeah, so those are some things I get in my classes, the same as Megan. What else you got over there, megs?
Megan:That's it. Those are my notes.
Jimmy Rios:All right. So I guess the big takeaway from this episode is it doesn't matter if it's female or male, everybody needs CPR and it doesn't change. So make sure, get out there. You know 30 and 2. If you're giving breaths, start compressions, keep that beat stand alive. Some people still like that one. I don't know. I'm kind of over the Bee Gees song. I don't even know what song I've been playing lately. What song have you been playing in your class?
Megan:Another one Bites the Dust because I have a dark sense of humor.
Jimmy Rios:I like that. Don't sing that out loud. No.
Megan:Baby Shark is one Imperial March from Star Wars.
Jimmy Rios:Yeah.
Megan:I have a whole playlist of them, those are my common ones.
Jimmy Rios:Nice, I'm pretty sick of my playlist right now, so I was asking. I've been doing this for a while, all right, well, hey, thanks for tuning in. Uh, click, like and subscribe, do all the fun things. Hit a comment and we'll see you next time adios.
