Video:How to Give CPR to Children Over 4

Transcript:How to Give CPR to Children Over 4

Hi! I am Dr. Charles Goodwin, a pediatric surgeon for the last 34 years. Today I am going to show you how to give CPR for children over 4. We are going to talk today about how to give CPR to a child from about age 4 to about age 12.

The Three C's of Child CPR

The first thing we will do, as always, is we will remember the three C's. We are going to come up to the scene. We will first check, that's the first C, we are going to check to see is it safe, it must be safe for us as well as for the patient. Once we have determined that it's safe, we are going to check to see can we determine what happened and check to see is that person conscious. "Are you okay?" Once we have identified the problem, now we are going to do the second C, which is call. "You call 911." At this point, we are going to care. The care consists of the ABC's; A stands for Airway, B stands for Breathing, C for Circulation, which includes heartbeat and bleeding.

Open Airway for Child CPR

So we are going to open the airway, and to do that we are going to tilt the head back. We don't need to do it quite as much as in an adult, but it needs to be tilted back. So we have now opened the airway. Now we are going to check for breathing. We are going to look, listen, and feel. We are going to put our head down, by the mouth and nose we are going to look to see is that chest rising and falling. We are listening to see that we feel air moving or we hear air moving and we are going to feel -- and we feel air moving. We are going to do this for about ten seconds. If there is no air moving, we are going to move on to B, the next step. So we are going to move on to giving breaths. We are going to put on our face shield, with the head titled back we are going to give two good breaths. Once we have done that we are going to check to see is there a pulse.

Move Onto Chest Compressions

If there is no pulse, we will move on to chest compressions. At this age, we are going to use one hand and we are going to do about 100 beats per minute. We are going to press down about one-and-a-half inches; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. We go back and give two more breaths, followed by 30 chest compressions, and we are going to do this for a cycle of five times of two breaths and 30 compressions. At that time, we stop and reassess is the patient breathing, is there a heartbeat, and we are going to continue this until the patient recovers, more skilled help arrives, or we get so tired we just can't continue.

This is how we give CPR to children over 4.