Aidan Silva loved soccer, basketball, baseball, and his younger brother, Devin. On a sunny afternoon over Labor Day weekend in 2010, Aidan collapsed without warning and died. He was seven years old.
The cause was determined to be sudden cardiac arrest, a condition where the heart malfunctions and stops beating abruptly. More than 356,000 Americans of all ages experienced sudden cardiac arrest in 2022, and nearly 90 percent of them died, according to the American Heart Association (AHA).
Chester County Hospital and Aidan's Heart Foundation are helping to raise awareness of sudden cardiac arrest by conducting heart screenings and CPR and automated external defibrillator training throughout the region.
On a Thursday evening last June – which would have been the month Aidan graduated from high school – Chester County Hospital partnered with the foundation to host two free, hands-only CPR and AED training sessions at the Marsh Creek Sixth Grade Center in Downingtown, PA. (These were not certification courses.) In all, 118 people attended.
Ahead of the sessions, Michele Francis, MS, RD, CDCES, LDN, Director of Community Health and Wellness for the hospital, said, "This event is to help people be educated and unafraid. Instead, they can be empowered to respond."
With sudden cardiac arrest, seconds matter. According to AHA data, bystanders initiated CPR in nearly 41 percent of cases, and about six percent used an AED.
Last June's training sessions, which took place during National CPR and AED Awareness Week, represented the first time the hospital and Aidan’s Heart Foundation collaborated.
"Some of our hospital’s staff had volunteered with the foundation, so we just started a dialogue with them," Francis explains.
The sessions were led by CPR-certified youth instructors, with support from other volunteers, including the hospital’s staff and other community members. Marshall-Silva reportedly contacted three local high school students – Maycie Kulp, Bailey Mullen, and Anna Powers – to ask if they could recruit instructors for the event. Within three days, they’d signed up more than 50 high school students, all certified in CPR and trained in administering an AED.
Most of them were certified (or recertified) at one of the two training sessions held a month earlier, organized and led by Jerry Peters, a director of the Good Fellowship Ambulance & EMS Training Institute in West Chester, PA and a paramedic since 1984. Marshall-Silva said they earned their certification specifically so they could volunteer at the June training sessions.
"Their intention is to pay tribute to their first-grade classmate they lost to sudden cardiac arrest," said Mary Maurer, a Chester County Hospital Emergency Department nurse who volunteers with Aidan's Heart Foundation. "This will be a senior capstone event and will honor Aidan's legacy and Christy’s mission."
Marshall-Silva is especially focused on equipping kids and teens with the skills necessary to respond in an emergency since sudden cardiac arrest is the leading cause of death among teenage athletes, according to the foundation, which has trained more than 8,000 children across the region in how to administer CPR and an AED.
"We like to teach kids these skills because they're not afraid to jump in to help their friend survive a cardiac event," Marshall-Silva said in promoting the training sessions. "We empower them with this knowledge because we know they can do it. It's not rocket science. You just have to be brave enough to take action."
