FAIRDALE, W.VA. – “Good job Dr. Zoey! You saved him,” ARH Community development Manager Kelly Elkins told a student in Fairdale Elementary School teacher Tara Grubb’s second grade class Tuesday morning.

Elkins, along with ARH Physician Liaison and LPN Amber Ellis, visited the classroom to teach hands-only CPR to the group of 21 students as part of Grubb’s annual Doctor’s Day festivities.

“It’s an across-the-board curriculum that combines math, reading, science and writing to help teach the students about the human body,” Grubb said.

Students, wearing operating room gowns, shoe covers, masks, gloves, hair coverings and name tags identifying them as doctors, crowded around makeshift operating tables where they practiced chest compressions on tiny mannequins.

“I’m going to play a song you all know,” Elkins told the group, explaining compressions would be given to the beat of the music.

As the familiar notes of the ever-popular “Baby Shark” rang out, Elkins and Ellis first demonstrated and then watched as the students administered aid.  

Students Morgan Toler and Emma Miller said they enjoyed the lesson.

“It was fun,” Toler said. “I learned a lot.”

Miller said she also learned from the demonstration, but added she wasn’t sure if she was ready to put her skills to the test just yet.

“I don’t think anyone can trust me to be a doctor, but I’m going to get myself a mannequin and practice,” she said.

That desire to continue to learn is what both Grubb and Elkins said the event was about.

“We want to both educate them and also build their confidence so they can see that they can do it, too,” Elkins said.

Grubb developed the hands-on curriculum, which also included using balloons to demonstrate how lungs take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide as well as soaking bread in water to demonstrate food digestion.

She said she hopes the lessons will spark something in the students that might guide them in the future.

“This is always my favorite day of the year and I hope one day it inspires some of them to become a nurse or a doctor or something else in the medical field.”

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Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH), is a not-for-profit health system operating 14 hospitals in Barbourville, Hazard, Harlan, Hyden, Martin, McDowell, Middlesboro, Paintsville, Prestonsburg, West Liberty, Whitesburg, and South Williamson in Kentucky and Beckley and Hinton in West Virginia, as well as multi-specialty physician practices, home health agencies, home medical equipment stores and retail pharmacies and medical spas. ARH employs approximately 6,700 people with an annual payroll and benefits of $474 million generated into our local economies. ARH also has a network of more than 1,300 providers on staff across its multi-state system. ARH is the largest provider of care and the single largest employer in southeastern Kentucky, and the third-largest private employer in southern West Virgi