Parent Heart Watch

Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) is the #1 killer of student athletes, contributes to the #2 medical cause of death under 25 and is the leading cause of death on school campuses. As the only national voice dedicated to SCA prevention in youth, our vision is to eliminate preventable deaths and disabilities from SCA by 2030. 

Founded in 2005, PHW is led by parents who have lost a child to SCA, or whose child survived SCA and is living with a heart condition, with allied health professionals and passionate prevention advocates. There is no better framework from which to construct a life-saving education program than one that is driven by people who know first-hand the tragic consequences of ignorance.

Parent Heart Watch advances SCA prevention on three levels: 1) Cultivating Champions:  Because there is no national prevention standard, we work towards this goal from the ground up by empowering community champions to create prevention programs that model best practices to protect young hearts. Collectively, we’ve placed 4,700+ AEDs serving more than 2.1 million, trained 354,000+ in CPR and AED use, and conducted free or affordable heart screenings for nearly half a million youth. 2) Creating Collaborations:  We drive the national dialogue in youth education, sports and medical communities through top-down collaborations that convert passive protocol into proactive SCA prevention strategies in youth communities. Partners include the Institute of Medicine National Cardiac Arrest Collaborative, Citizen CPR Foundation/ECCU, Cardiac Safety Research Consortium, NATA Youth Sports Safety Alliance, NIH/CDC Sudden Death in the Young Registry, American Heart Association’s Cardiac Emergency Response Plan Task Force, National School Nurse Association, & SHAPE America. 3) Equipping Caregivers:  Our national awareness campaign, Take the Prevention Promise, produces free resources that motivate adults engaged with youth to be prepared to protect young hearts.

Parent Heart Watch advocates and educates in five focus areas: 1) Recognizing the truce incidence of SCA in youth; 2) Advocating for early detection by understanding warning signs and risk factors, and through heart screenings with an electrocardiogram (EKG) and/or echocardiogram; 3) Promoting proper execution of the Cardiac Chain of Survival with CPR training and widespread and accessible automated external defibrillators (AEDs); 4) Having a well practiced Cardiac Emergency Action Plan (CERP); and 5) Establishing a registry of youth lost to SCA to affect future best practices, policy and legislation to protect young hearts.