City of Arlington will use Cowboys Stadium for world-record CPR training attempt

An official Guinness adjudicator will be on hand to verify the simultaneous training of 4,500 local eighth-graders.

On November 17 at 10 a.m., about 4,500 eighth graders from schools in the Arlington Independent School District will attempt to break the Guinness World Record for "largest CPR training session," currently held by officials of Oslo, Norway -- who "trained up" 3,692 participants all at once.

The event will take place at Cowboys Stadium, with a Guinness World Records official adjudicator on hand to witness and validate the achievement, according to Battalion Chief of Medical Operations David Carroll with the Arlington Fire Department.

Says Arlington Mayor Robert Cluck: “Being able to train more people in one session than anyone else in the world is certainly noteworthy, and we’ll be proud of that. But we’re not losing sight of the fact that this initiative really is a matter of life and death. The best way to increase survival rates for cardiac arrest victims is to equip bystanders with the knowledge of administering CPR.”

Mayor Cluck -- a physician himself -- initiated a program called CPaRlington in 2005, working with representatives of the American Heart Association, the Arlington Fire Department, and the UT Arlington School of Nursing. The program is designed to increase the cardiac arrest survival rate by spreading CPR skills far and wide. Since the program began, approximately 25,140 Arlington residents have been trained.

source: City of Arlington