Inside an office conference room in a building near the New Carrollton Metro station, a woman quickly opened an AED device and began screaming for someone else to call 911. A woman next to her did the same thing.
In this case, it was luckily a drill.
Six people, some of them pharmacists at Giant, others from a local community group, were inside that office for special CPR and life skills training now available through Giant’s pharmacy.
It’s a four-hour lesson that includes training and certification in CPR, and by the end you’ll also know how to operate one of the defibrillators you see hanging on the walls in gyms, stores and office buildings. And like your groceries, you can have Giant deliver that training to you.
“[The training is] going to go through the entire process of how to identify cardiac emergency, it’s going to go through the process of how to do proper chest compressions, proper breathing, how to operate an AED, and also how to help if someone’s having a choking incident too, it helps with that as well,” Paul Zvaleny, the director of pharmacy operations for Giant Food.
The class is provided by pharmacists who are trained by the American Heart Association, which says your odds of surviving cardiac arrest will triple if CPR is started within two minutes of someone collapsing. But fewer than 20% of Americans are up to date with CPR training.
“We come on site to you. You don’t have to come to our locations, we’ll come to you on your location, make it as convenient as we possibly can,” said Zvaleny. “And when the training is complete, you’ll have full knowledge of how to do CPR and how to work an AED well for children, adults and infants.”
Not many people have ever used an AED and thus probably aren’t aware that it will instruct you on exactly what to do from the minute you open it up — which can be crucially important at a moment when everyone around you, including yourself, might be in a panic. The training can provide some understanding that could prove valuable in the future.
“The proper CPR is really important,” he added. “I think everybody should know, at any given time, an issue could arise that you may not be prepared for. We want everybody prepared for that.”
They are situations that pharmacists at Giant have had to respond to themselves, when customers have found themselves in medical emergencies. But sometimes, you or someone you know might fall ill without being around a pharmacist.
It could happen when you’re out and about, or in an office, or a million other places that don’t have a paramedic ready to respond.
But why would a grocery store offer this kind of training?
Zvaleny said the answer isn’t that difficult, if you notice how grocery stores, libraries and other “community hubs” have evolved since the pandemic.
“Over the last several years, we’ve really become more than just filling prescriptions,” he said. “We do immunizations as well. Right now, there’s a need for us to provide more services and more access to quality health care.”
“They (pharmacists) are prepared to do this,” he added.
The classes are offered by Giant for $69.99 per person, with a minimum of six people required for each session, though Zvaleny says they can accommodate entire offices or day care staffs as well.
“We come to you, we make it easy,” he explained. Anyone interested in signing up can email the Giant CPR team by clicking here.
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