Ep. 13: Building a Lifesaving Community: CPR/AED Training, Equity & Empowerment Across WNY

Out‑of‑hospital cardiac arrest remains one of the leading causes of death in the United States. More than 350,000 Americans experience cardiac arrest outside a hospital each year, yet survival remains near 10 percent, despite strong evidence that immediate CPR can double or even triple a person’s chance of survival.

Western New York reflects these national trends, with significant disparities in CPR access and training across communities. But through sustained, community‑driven outreach, the region is emerging as a model for improving cardiac emergency readiness, particularly in historically underserved neighborhoods where the need is greatest.

In this episode, host Allison Brashear, MD, MBA, vice president for health sciences and dean of the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, speaks with Leslie J. Bisson, MD, and Karen Bisson, BSN, a dedicated CPR/AED outreach program coordinator at UBMD Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine, about their leadership in advancing community CPR readiness across Western New York. The conversation explores how grassroots education, lived experience, and public engagement can strengthen the fabric of community health—and why CPR literacy is one of the most powerful, achievable public health interventions today.

Dr. Bisson and Karen are founders and lead instructors of UBMD Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine’s CPR/AED Outreach Program, through which they have delivered more than 300 Hands‑Only CPR and AED training sessions and empowered more than 32,000 Western New Yorkers. Their work emphasizes equitable access to lifesaving skills in neighborhoods where bystander CPR rates have historically been lowest. In recognition of their impact, the Bissons received the 2024 Partnership of the Year Award from Buffalo Black Nurses, Inc.

The discussion also reflects on how nationally visible events, such as the 2023 cardiac emergency involving Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin, have renewed urgency and momentum around CPR education in Western New York and beyond.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the UB Medicine Podcast. I'm Dr. Allison Brashir, Dean of the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and Vice President for Health Sciences here at the University at Buffalo. Today we're talking about something both practical and powerful: CPR readiness. Every year in the United States, more than 350,000 people have out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. Survival remains around 10%, even though immediate CPR can double or even triple a person's chance of survival. Here in Western New York, we're seeing some patterns, but there is change. Delivering more than 300 hands-only CPR sessions and empowering over 32,000 Western New Yorkers with these life-saving skills, many in communities that had the lowest access to CPR training. Their work was recognized in the 2024 Partnership of the Year Award from the Black Buffalo Nurses Incorporated, and it's a testimony to their commitment to equity, access, and community partnership. Les and Karen, welcome, and we're glad you're here. I'm going to give a little bit of background for those of you who don't know. Dr. Leslie Basson is the June A. and Eugene R. Mendel professor and chair of orthopedics and associate dean for clinical transformation. He's also the medical director of the Buffalo Bills and the Buffalo Sabres. And he's a national leader in CPR outreach and recipient of the NFL PS Riddick Award for Academic Excellence. And Karen Bassan is a nurse with a business degree, and she brings a deep clinical and community experience from critical care nursing to infection control as an officer for the Buffalo Sabres during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is now extraordinary coordinating this extraordinary effort. And I just want to thank you both. First of all, what you're doing for our community and for being here. So you've trained 32,000 people, unless I remember getting your pictures when this started on Saturday mornings of where you which high school you were at. Can you tell us about how you realized that you needed to do this?

SPEAKER_02 2:35

Yeah, I couldn't. It started after DeMar's cardiac arrest. So I had been involved in two other high-profile sporting events years and years ago. Kevin Everett for the Buffalo Bills suffered an onfield paralysis that was able to be reversed with some chilled saline and early surgery. And then shortly after that, months later, Richard Zednik, uh player for the Florida Panthers, I was attending at the game, the Sabres game. He was a visiting player, obviously, and he was kicked in the carotid artery and started bleeding to death. And I was one of the first responders who was able to control his bleeding until we could get him to the hospital and get that repaired. Those two events happening years ago, I realized that there was going to be a lot of attention paid to the medical staff afterwards, the type of injury, that sort of thing. So that was a thing that was just planted in the back of my mind as a sports medicine physician. So fast forward to DeMar's event, and we attend to him on the field, give him CPR, defibrillate them. And afterwards, 30 million people saw that on Monday Night Football. And afterwards, I'm processing that whole thing. So there's a whole bunch of things going through my mind. I knew that people were going to be paying attention to cardiac arrest and CPR. I knew that DeMar was fortunate in that he had the resources available to him, where not everybody has resources available for the same thing. So it caused me for a couple days to really focus on something that I hadn't been focusing on, which is out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and CPR and disparities in who gets CPR and who doesn't. There are gender disparities, racial disparities, socioeconomic disparities. With all of that sort of circulating and brewing around in my mind, I thought, is there something that we could do with this attention? So I started talking to people. I talked to Karen about it. I started thinking about things. And it kind of came together that maybe what we could do is start bringing CPR training to underserved communities. Our department has an athletic outreach training program that was already going into underserved communities. We were supplying athletic trainers to a lot of schools in the Buffalo public school system. So it kind of started to crystallize as we have some infrastructure that is already embedded in some of these communities. Can we work with other people that are also working in these communities, understand the context, and can help us to make things culturally sensitive? Can we train our athletic trainers to then start teaching their student athletes and their family members hands-only CPR? And maybe that can start to close that gap. So it it started with that. And we piloted it, it was successful. I asked Karen if she would be willing to be the program coordinator for this project that I had in mind, and it really sort of started snowballing into something.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

And and you received the American Heart Association's Health Equity Leadership Award for this work. And I think you've really um put a focus on the equity piece of it, which is so important. Can you tell us a little bit about the collaboration with the Buffalo Black Nurses group?

SPEAKER_02 6:00

One of the things that I think we all recognized is that looking into someone else's neighborhood and saying, I'm going to come in here and solve a problem doesn't always go well. And you want to make sure that you understand the communities that you're working with and their backgrounds and where they're coming from and everything else. So we started talking to some people that were working in the communities, and one of the earliest groups that we met with was some members of the Buffalo Black nurses. Karen and I sat down one morning at Spot Coffee and talked to some of their leadership. And we said, you know, you're working in these communities. First of all, do you think that there would be interest in learning CPR? And if so, do you do you think you'd be interested in partnering or helping us to do that better? And they thought that there would be a great deal of interest and they were interested in partnering. So they really have been incredibly valuable and um just outstanding partners of ours.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

So Karen, I think um uh 300 community events uh and you're coordinating this, and tell tell us how it works um in terms of coordinating and also how the the the hands-alyed CPR works because we trained one of our our groups here and it was fun and quick, and they got it, and um a couple of those songs stick in your head forever.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

They do, it is fun and it is quick, and um most of our events have kind of stemmed from they they kind of um branch off of each other. So it started in the schools with the athletic trainers um bringing us into the schools and training students and and parents. And then once we started working with the Buffalo black nurses who were already embedded in the community, we started to meet other community leaders who wanted to invite us to um to schools, to churches, to community centers. We started working with uh um black men in white coats. Cheyenne small introduced us to the Say Yes Buffalo program, and now that is a regular event that we attend any Saturday that there's a Saturday Academy. We're typically at two to three of them, and we meet people from there. So usually everyone contacts me and then I put it out on Sign Up Genius to our amazing instructors who snap the events up right away.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

And that's all volunteer. And um uh the black men and white coaches out of the medical school, those are students. Yes. Um, and you have a group of volunteers that run this for you, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:36

So yeah, they um I usually I try to go to the events. I do enjoy going to the events. I'm also a CPR instructor, so that is that is truly my love in all of this. I bring all of the mannequins to them. We set up the event and they are so engaging. They um are able to convince people to come over. They they come over to the table, they um train train them in 10 minutes and they make it fun, they train kids, people of all ages. Um, anyone who can't do compressions, they'll give them a verbal training, they'll show them what to do so that even if they're in a situation where they can't perform the compressions, they can tell somebody else what to do. We also have giveaways, we give them wristbands and flashlight pens. So they they make it fun.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

And you teach them either baby shark or Saturday Live or compare those other ones.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Depending on the age, usually the kids don't know Saturday, the staying alive song. I can remember it, but baby shark pretty much everyone knows. And once you have that in your head, you can't get it out. But then the teenagers, they um, you know, we we kind of come up with songs for them too.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

That's terrific. So um, Les, I think there's been some really powerful stories come out of this. Um, there's um I recall there was some training where someone got trained and then later used it later in that afternoon. Can you share just a snip short story about the impact?

SPEAKER_02 10:00

Absolutely. There um there are plenty of stories that way. At one of the say yes events on a Saturday morning. So we have these Saturday morning academies. We'll we call it a fluid event, we'll set up a table. There's already going to be people there. We try to set up our tables near the food and train a bunch of people as they're kind of moving their way through the Saturday morning event. So one of our very experienced instructors, Dan Johnson, who's a superstar and has been unbelievable in terms of his passion and energy that he gives to the training. He's he's there training some people, and someone comes up to him and says, Hey, can you help us for a minute? There's somebody down around the corner over there. So Dan goes running over, and there's a person that's had an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. So he gives them CPR, and everybody calls 911 and does their thing, and the EMS people come there, and the person was alive and brought to the hospital. There was a there was another story where that what will happen commonly, and Karen sees this I know a lot because he's at uh essentially all of these events, is someone will come up and say, Hey, you taught me before, you taught me months ago, you taught me last year, or whatever it is. There was an episode up in Wilson where a uh visiting team coach had a cardiac arrest, and it was in the news. They showed, I don't believe that they showed the person collapsing, but they were telling the story. And one of the things that happened, you know, there's these simple things call 911, push hard and fast in the center of the chest, and send someone for the closest AED. And then when it arrives, turn it on and it'll tell you what to do. That's the that's how everybody saves people. So that was going on with this visiting coach. And one of the things that happened is a bunch of people were running to get the AED in the school. So they had some school video where it shows these people sprinting to get this AED, grabbing it and bringing it back. A few weeks later, what somebody came up to one of our instructors at one of these events and says, By the way, I was one of the people that ran and got the AED. And I felt so much more comfortable knowing what to do. And we have them practice with AED simulators in that too. So she said, It really helped me just understanding what I needed to do, and I was able to think clearly and do my job because of the training that you all had delivered.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

That's so powerful because you know, um 32,000 people, and I know you want to grow and grow and grow that. Um, you have also mapped the AEDs because I'm mindful that if you don't know where the AED is, you are you doing CPR for a long time until someone comes. And you had some medical students work with you and you mapped it. Can you just share a little bit about what that project was?

SPEAKER_02 12:51

So there's we applied for a social justice fellowship. There's the Jacobs School Social Justice Program, and one of our social justice fellows decided that that was the program that she was going to take on. So we there there's an app that you can use to map AEDs. It's uh called Pulse Point. Um, if you have the app, if you see an AED, you can take a picture of it, you can register where it is, and then someone else will come back and verify it. And then once it's in that system, it can be visible to the 911 dispatcher. So the the way the system would work is somebody calls 911 and the dispatcher says, okay, great, we've got people on the way. And by the way, do you know that there's an AED in the school across the street or something like that? So if someone can run over there and get that, that's a great thing. If you look at the before and after of our AED mapping contest, and you look at that pulse point app, it's a little map that you can pull out and it'll show you where the different AEDs are. We started with about 115 and we ended up with about 1,100 AEDs mapped in Western New York. So it became a real thing. And we were very grateful to some of the people that worked with us. The Buffalo Bills were super generous in terms of um having some playoffs. I think it was it was regular season game tickets at that time, but anyways, they there were some tickets for somebody if they won the contest, and there was um some financial compensation. I think it was$500 for first prize, or maybe it was three, two, and one, something like that. And then right when the contest was coming to an end about a week before, Josh Allen donated a pair of signed cleats, and that really caused a spike in participation. And I think the person that won, um, do you recall how many AEDs Matt mapped? It was 600 or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Yeah. Several hundred.

SPEAKER_02 14:40

Yeah, people would map hundreds of AEDs. And there's actually a similar contest going on right now in Orchard Park, the Orchard Park School District. Joel Seezak has been spearheading an AED mapping contest in Orchard Park that we're going to announce the winner of in early May.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

That's terrific. And so I think one of the things you just described is a whole community engagement that that the two of you started that has taken on a life of its own, and people are, I mean, these stories they're powerful and getting people engaged. What do you see as the future? I'm sure you want to train 100,000 people, but can this be scaled across the state, scaled across the country? Um, next time I'm I'm going to Arizona, then I'm going to pull up my app and see what, see how many AEDs I see. So what do you what do you want to do in the future?

SPEAKER_01 15:29

I think this whole thing started with a great idea, Les's idea of combining, you know, teaching hands-only CPR, going into under historically underserved communities, and then uh leveraging a program that was already in place. And I think that that was kind of key in in how our program got started, and then growing from there. So I think that it it is scalable in in any medical school, university, community.

SPEAKER_02 15:55

We would do the same thing. This has been sort of based uh at the medical school, but involving many, many unbelievable partners in the community. Are as we said earlier, the Buffalo Black nurses have been unbelievable. The Jacob School of Black Men and White Coats, the American Heart Association, the Buffalo Bills. Um we we get support from the Kaleida Foundation, ACMC Foundation, UB Foundation, the Mother Cabrini Foundation has been just an unbelievable supporter of this. The Bauer Foundation, so uh many, many and and NFL Foundation, if I didn't mention that, many, many entities have been supportive of this. We've been so, so fortunate and grateful to have unbelievable partners. But uh taking that and moving it to another medical school, moving it to other SUNY places, um, moving it to other NFL franchises, there are plenty of ways to scale this. And we'd also like to scale it locally and move it into community centers, um, more community centers, more churches. There's still lots of work to be done here in a big way.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

Yeah, and I I think ref framing it under the equity lens is so important because, you know, um that's where we can really um get a huge opportunity because out of cardiac, out of hospital cardiac arrest, um, uh as you said, it's it's it's critical. And you know, we want to make sure that everybody gets the care that they need. And um I just want to thank the two of you for your work and for taking what was a national highly visible tragedy with a very good result, but but but really um and then using that for good is incredible and the engagement of so many people and students. We always um have one kind of question, and I ask each of you, you know, what's your key takeaway that you think about the future of health in Western New York? And Karen, I'm gonna start with you. And you know, what what is it that you hope to see um about this in the future?

SPEAKER_01 18:08

Well, I think just starting with um how um remarkable it was to me when we first started going into these communities, how many groups and organizations were already there, already there um bringing resources and education and and giveaways and trying to make these communities stronger and healthier. So I see that and then seeing um our instructors and how enthusiastic they are and this younger generation of students and how they're not just participating in community service, they're passionate about making a difference. So I really love seeing that and I'd love to see more of it. That's wonderful. And Les, your thoughts?

SPEAKER_02 18:50

I think that the future of health in Western New York is really bright. Going to a lot of these events and seeing the positive energy and the engagement and the excitement. It's I I'm always so impressed and proud at the same time of our unbelievable instructors and our unbelievable community members. Like Karen says, the people that are working so hard in all these different areas and so much positive energy. You you there are times when healthcare can be draining. It takes a lot from people, there's physician burnout and all these other things. And you you go to some of these events and you empower people to do the best thing for themselves and their community and and you leave energized. It is absolutely energizing. And I think that the people are the participants are energized. I think the instructors are energized. I know that the people that work on the project are energized. So it's it's a really, really beautiful thing.

SPEAKER_00 19:47

You know, you said something. Engagement is a very good recipe for burnout. Um, and as we are in this very complex world that healthcare is changing daily, that's an excellent point. I want to thank the two of you for joining us today. I want to thank you for your passion, uh, for your commitment, for we're thinking broadly across communities. It's really been a demonstration of what an idea can do and how we can take it. And I'm looking forward to continuing to get pictures from the different places and hearing when you hit the 50,000 and the 100,000 people that are trained. Um, I'm Dr. Allison Bashir, and this is the UB Medicine Podcast. I want to thank our listeners for joining us today. And we look forward to continuing conversations about innovation, discovery, and the future of healthcare in Western New York. Thank you.