Episode Summary: 

Kerrie Zakaras is the Executive Program Director at Desert Education Solutions, LLC, as well as a Registered Nurse. Throughout her career, she has worked in nearly every area of hospital operations, including ICU, PACU, Telemetry, and Medical-Surgical units. She is a certified wound care nurse and former hospital administrator for a multi-campus hospital group in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. 

Today, Kerrie devotes the majority of her time to teaching and further developing the curriculum at Desert Education. In our conversation, she shares how she acquired a passion for teaching life-saving skills that anybody, even those outside the medical profession, should know. 

Kerrie shares how a personal tragedy became the catalyst that motivated her to teach CPR. She also gives a few unexpected and sobering facts about cardiac arrests that illustrate why she strongly believes that everybody should know how to deal with it and, better yet, prevent it. 

Listen in as Kerrie discusses the CPR Certification fundamentals, all the common terms we need to know (ex. “CPR”, “cardiac arrest”, “AED”, heart attack, etc.), how to perform CPR in different situations, and how to update your marketing as a pool professional if you are CPR certified. 

Topics Discussed: 

• 01:05 - An introduction to Kerrie 
• 08:21 - Why Kerrie chose to teach CPR as a side hustle 
• 12:31 - What is CPR and how does one become certified? 
• 15:33 - How is cardiac arrest different from a heart attack? 
• 19:37 - Why everyone