For Immediate Release
Date: February 11, 2013

Mayor Edna B. Jackson and members of City Council will join with City staff at a press conference at 10 a.m. Thursday, February 14, on the front steps of the Civic Center, to launch an exciting new initiative led by the City to train 6,000 Savannahians in life-saving CPR by year's end.

The Savannah CPR Initiative is the result of a competitive grant recently awarded to the Mayor's Office by the Bloomberg Foundation, the American Heart Association, and Blue Cross Blue Shield. Savannah was one of five cities to receive the award. The others were Austin, Texas; Buffalo, N.Y.; Milwaukee, Wis.; and Virginia Beach, Va.

The grant provides Savannah with 1,000 Hands-Only CPR kits, which includes an inflatable torso to practice CPR, printed materials and a DVD instructing viewers on how to perform Hands-Only CPR. The City is tasked with training 1,000 Savannahians in this technique this year. Each of these trainees will in turn pledge to train at least five other individuals, bringing to 6,000 the total number of Savannahians trained in CPR. The hope is that "Savannah's 6,000" will vastly improve our community's ability to respond to sudden cardiac emergencies, doubling our survival rate for witnessed out-of-hospital cardiac arrests.

The City has partnered with the nonprofit Saving Lives in Chatham County to help accomplish this goal. Together we will offer free Hands-Only CPR training sessions at dozens of locations, including all-day sessions at the Civic Center and all City community centers, as well as the local hospitals and a number of local hotels and major employers.