Hands-on community health

By Michael Garofalo

Lula Mae Phillips and Jody Scopa Goldman are on a mission to show New Yorkers that with a bit of training, anyone can help save a life.

The duo have taught countless members of the public — everyone from students to seniors — how to perform hands-only CPR through community training programs at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and Weill Cornell Medicine.

It only takes a few minutes for Phillips and Goldman, both nurses, to teach hands-only CPR. It's as easy as demonstrating proper chest compression technique on mannequin torsos and imparting a simple mantra: check, call, and compress. People are sometimes sheepish about getting on their knees to practice on the dummies — “If I can get on my knees, you can too!” Phillips often says to convince would-be pupils — but the lessons almost always end with a smile.

“It's really nice when they get up and are like, 'Wow, I can do it!'” Goldman said.

Hands-only CPR — which, in contrast to traditional CPR, does not involve mouth-to-mouth resuscitation — can make a life-saving difference in cases of sudden cardiac arrest. Less than half of the 350,000 Americans who suffer out-of-hospital cardiac arrests each year receive any help before EMS arrive — a statistic Goldman and Phillips are working to change. Immediately administering CPR can double or even triple a cardiac arrest victim's chances of survival.

“We want to really encourage the community and show that there's nothing to it,” Goldman said.

In addition to teaching classes at the medical center's Upper East Side campus, Phillips and Goldman take their training program on the road to sidewalk health fairs, senior centers, churches, and farmers' markets around the city. Health fairs, like the one New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell holds each June during national CPR Awareness Week, are a way to show the public just how easy — and important — the technique is.

Goldman, a program manager at the Ronald O. Perelman Heart Institute, especially enjoys her weekly training sessions with drivers from the Black Car Fund, an organization that provides health benefits to black-car and limousine drivers. The drivers often begin the class with lukewarm enthusiasm, but inevitably loosen up as they learn the technique on mannequins. “By the end, they're almost tripping over each other to do it,” Goldman said with a laugh.

Phillips, community engagement and research manager at Weill Cornell Medicine's Clinical Translational Science Center, was momentarily taken aback when a woman loudly called for her at one recent event. “She said, 'Yo! I'm looking for you,'” Phillips recalled. “And I said to myself, 'Oh God, what did I do?'” But the woman wasn't angry — she just wanted to tell Phillips that she had saved her granddaughter's life using the techniques she had learned at an earlier session.

“It empowers them,” Goldman said. “This is a way of taking control of your community's health.”