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Three Utah nurses, EMTs awarded for saving man who collapsed at Riverton Park

Posted at 6:42 PM, Oct 26, 2017
and last updated 2017-10-26 20:43:13-04

RIVERTON, Utah — Three local women and several Unified Fire EMTs were given the Life Saving Award on Thursday.

A ceremony at Unified Fire station 124 included dozens of family and friends to meet the recipients.

The women, Shelly Burton, Meghan Allen and Stephanie Burt were all there to accept their award.

On August 16, the women were at a picnic with their LDS ward at Riverton Park. Nearby, there were some people playing Ultimate Frisbee.

“One of the guys from their group came over and said somebody needed help,” said Burton.  A man was going into cardiac arrest.

They went over to help.  The women were aware that each other were nurses at Primary Children’s Hospital and knew they might be able to offer their medical training skills to the victim.

“We looked at him and tried to do an assessment and found out he had no pulse and he was agonal breathing and we were fortunate enough to start CPR right there. Then we had another friend who is a respiratory therapist and she opened his airway while we were able to administer CPR and continue to do that until EMS got there," Burton said.

The Unified Fire Station was across the street from the park. Someone flagged down a fire truck that was leaving on another call. They turned around to help the man having the heart attack at the park.  They showed up and used a defibrillator on the man. He then started breathing on his own and is alive today because of the team effort from the women and the EMTs.

The women were treated like heroes at the ceremony.

“Don’t feel like a hero, just feel fortunate that I was in the right place at the right time to help somebody and have a really good outcome,” said Burton.

“I feel very lucky to have had the training and that we were there as a team and help him together because the outcome was awesome,” said Allen.

They said that even if they were not nurses and still knew how to give CPR they could have still saved his life.

“Anybody can be trained, anybody can learn anybody can give as good of quality CPR as I can,” said Burton.

The Unified Fire EMTs agreed. They encourage everyone to go to their website to learn how to give CPR:

http://pushtosurvive.org/

An EMT will show you how to give quality life-saving chest compressions.  You’ll never know, when you might need to use that training.