CPR Fun – Having a Blast With CPR!
Can CPR be fun? We think so at CPREdu.
Alright, alright, CPR is a medical procedure that is used in situations which are definitely not funny, and people experiencing cardiac arrest is generally not a time to get out the party poppers. That’s fair enough.
But that doesn’t mean that the entire topic has to be boring. You can make CPR education fun and inject life into your lessons or educational center – it’s just about having the right mindset!
Any good educator should be lively, and that’s just as true for CPR and first-aid teachers. If you’re not having fun, then your students aren’t either.
By making CPR classes fun, it not only means that people will be more engaged and the classes much more bearable, but the classes will actually be more memorable and students will retain the information more – helping them save a life later when the not-fun situation occurs.
Plus, they do say that laughter is the best medicine, and we’re all about making people feel better here…
So, here are some of the ways we’ve made CPR more fun over the years!
1. A healthy dose of humor
This works in and out of the classroom. I think it’s pretty common for people in healthcare and similar fields that can stray into morbid areas to have kind of a dark sense of humor.
When you’re dealing with people dying and seeing some tremendous suffering, it’s only natural that a coping mechanism would be to joke about those kinds of things.
Now, as CPR educators or students, you’re hopefully not going to see anything super traumatic and won’t be transforming into the next mildly-sadistic and emotionally-damaged House-esque character.
So, you probably won’t need to go off the deep end with this. But you can always crack jokes in class, with your coworkers, and use memes and such in communications.
Want to make a CPR presentation more fun? Chuck a meme in.
Want to make your CPR or first-aid course social pages more entertaining? Whack a joke in.
Sending an email with some admin info about one of your upcoming CPR courses? Lighten it up with a CPR pun.
If you’re not the most naturally witty, you can check out pages like these for jokes to be inspired by (or just directly lift – we won’t tell.): https://upjoke.com/cpr-jokes. Naturally, you’ll need to use common sense – don’t be getting wildly out there in your attempts to make CPR more fun. It’s a topic which always holds some degree of gravity!
2. Treats and Rewards
Who doesn’t love getting treats for doing well at class? We all experienced this as kids, and I guess we never truly grow up, because it works just as well to make CPR class more fun for adults as well!
Candy tends to go down best (we encourage healthy lifestyles and nutritious diets at CPREdu, but small indulgences are permissible if not necessary!), and Lifesavers are made extra delicious by the pun – reward those CPR-practicing lifesavers with some Lifesavers like the clever pups they are!
A handful of sugar helps the theoretical medical knowledge go down, as they (I) say.
3. Competition
Another way to make CPR more fun and potentially incorporate point 2 is to introduce the element of competition between students.
Bring in a point-scoring system for questions answered, do a pop quiz, whatever! Get creative, as long as there’s a winner and you keep it friendly (we don’t want any altercations that are
going to result in real first-aid having to be performed, no matter how educational that may be…!), people will have more fun and be more motivated.
4. Juicy statistics and interesting facts
Medical info is something that a lot of people just find naturally pretty interesting, and you can definitely take advantage of that with CPR facts, figures about cardiac events, etc! You’ve probably already heard some interesting stuff in your own training which you can now drop to your CPR class students, but extra research would never go amiss either.
For example, did you (or your students) know that women are much less likely than men to receive CPR assistance and more likely to die after a sudden cardiac arrest mostly because people are too uncomfortable to perform CPR on unfamiliar women since it involves touching their chest area?
This kind of fact is not only interesting to your students, but may make them extra conscious of the fact that if there’s a woman in trouble – they may need to step in!
Check out this site for some good CPR facts and figures: https://www.procpr.org/blog/training/cpr-facts-and-stats
5. Have Fun
The way to make CPR more fun is to have fun – wow, what a hot take!
But seriously, if you’re not having fun, it’s likely that no one else will be.
Always do your best to bring a pleasant and jovial attitude to your communications and CPR classes. Even if you’re not cracking constant jokes, just being good-natured and smiley will go a long way to relaxing the atmosphere and freeing people up to have a bit of fun with CPR.
You can also control your environment if you aren’t doing at-home classes – put up fun posters, seasonal decorations, etc. Again, as long as it’s safe and not going to offend everyone, the sky’s the limit.
Even if you’re doing at-home CPR classes, you can exercise what little creative freedom you’re allowed by wearing some quirky christmas accessory around the season, dressing up a ‘sidekick’ infant CPR manikin, whatever!
Those are just a few ways that you can inject some fun into life as someone who works in CPR or first-aid education.
You want to make it so that you and your students will be looking forward to classes, not seeing them as a chore.
We’ve been delivering fun and engaging CPR and BLS courses all over the Bay Area for several years now, and it works for us!