Safe Sitter® Celebrates 30 Years of Saving Lives

For Immediate Release
April 1, 2010 

Contact: Jennifer Seward
(800) 255-4089 ext. 19
infojennifer@safesitter.org  

Safe Sitter® Celebrates 30 Years of Saving Lives

"If just one life is saved, then it's worth it." We've all heard this. 

It was one life, which couldn't be saved, that inspired the creation of Safe Sitter®, the only national not-for-profit solely devoted to babysitting training, in March of 1980. 

Patricia A. Keener, M.D. was performing duties as Medical Director of Nurseries and Pediatrics at Community Hospitals Indianapolis. As pediatric expert on staff, Dr. Keener was called to the emergency room when an 18-month-old girl was brought in. The little girl had choked on her breakfast while in the care of an adult sitter. The sitter, not knowing what to do, brought the child to the hospital. 

Tragically, and despite Dr. Keener's best efforts, the little girl died. Had the adult sitter known what to do, this story would have had a very different ending. 

In the past 30 years, Safe Sitter® has made happy endings possible. Here are just a few. Visit /about-us/30-years-of-saving-lives.aspx to find out what these heroes-and the people they saved-are doing now. 

►In 1984, Amanda Soliday took Safe Sitter® at Community Hospital in Indianapolis when she was 11. Just a few months after completing the course, she used the rescue breathing skills she'd been taught to save a toddler who had stopped breathing due to a febrile seizure. The toddler was her mother's best friend's daughter. The toddler's family nominated Soliday for Safe Sitter® of the Year and she became the second sitter awarded this honor.

►In 1991, Chessa Stubbs, then 13, was watching her toddler sister Alexandra, a job she assumed on a regular basis while their mother operated an at-home tutoring business. Her sister began choking on raw carrot sticks. "She was gagging without any sound coming out. I could tell it [the carrot] was really lodged," said Chessa, who performed abdominal thrusts (Heimlich maneuver) two times until she could see the carrot in her sister's mouth. Chessa had just completed the Safe Sitter® course two weeks earlier at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston. She was named the 1992 Safe Sitter® of the Year.

►In 2003, Cody Nance took Safe Sitter® at Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas when he was 12. "I believed in the program so thoroughly that when Cody, who would never in a million years want to baby-sit, got to the appropriate age, I enrolled him in one of my Safe Sitter® classes," said his mother, Nadine Nance, a Safe Sitter® Instructor. Little did Nadine know that her son would use the very skills she'd taught him to save her life four years later. One evening, as Nadine prepared dinner, she tasted a slice of hot roast beef. She inhaled a deep breath as she put it in her mouth and, almost instantly, it became stuck in her throat. Cody stepped behind her, gave three quick, forceful abdominal thrusts and the meat was dislodged. 

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