Our Team

Our team is a collaboration between MIT Emergency Medical Services and Harvard’s Crimson Emergency Medical Services. We are all American Heart Association (AHA) Certified CPR Instructors, and we organize all of the CPR and First Aid classes that occur at our respective schools, coordinating a cadre of instructors and ensuring that equipment and training practices are following the AHA standards. Combined, we have certified over a thousand people in CPR, teaching classes to not only members of our collegiate communities but also community members and medical professionals from across Boston and Cambridge.

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We became interested in this issue after students from some of our classes stated that they were uncertain about the mechanics of doing CPR on a person with breasts, and expressed that they would feel uncomfortable rendering aid to a woman that was suffering cardiac arrest in front of them. We reached out to our partners at other CPR training centers and found that others were troubled by the lack of female manikin options, but were not sure what to do. When we met with the AHA, they stated that they want better female manikin options, but are unable to produce them, as they do not design or fund the creation of training devices. As we looked further into research on this issue, we were shocked to find the noticeable disparity between out-of-hospital bystander CPR rates between men and women and were also frustrated by the lack of quality female-anatomy CPR manikin options available on the market.