Island Park Kiwanis helps kids

The Island Park Kiwanis Club is reaching out to the community to help the organization raise money to refurbish the pediatric resuscitation kits it supplied to the Island Park Fire Department a few years ago.

The Kiwanis will be hosting a surf-and-turf dinner fundraiser on Aug. 5 on the beach, catered by Outback Steakhouse.

“It’s going to be steak and shrimp and salad and all the fixings, all donated by — and served by — Outback,” said Barbra Rubin, a Kiwanis board member. “That’s their donation. And we’ll have the drinks and the baskets we’re raffling off and a 50/50.”

The resuscitation kits were specially designed for children by Armstrong Medical Industries, and the IPFD keeps them in its ambulances in case of emergencies. Everything in the kit is color-coded to make things fast and easy for emergency responders.

“The doses are premeasured for the age, height and weight of the child,” explained Margaret Rodriguez, the Fire Department’s secretary and an EMT in the rescue company. “So it’s not a guessing game of regular adult medications or administration. In an emergency situation, time is everything. So it really does expedite the whole process.”

With child-sized doses, emergency responders don’t have to use valuable time cutting down adult doses of medications — everything is ready to go.

“The idea is that ambulances would go to fire or emergencies, and they’d have adult stuff,” Rubin said. “So we started donating [the resuscitation kits].”

The Kiwanis Club initially donated pediatric trauma kits to the Fire Department. They contained child-sized ambulance equipment (such as child-sized stretchers) and stuffed animals. But the other kits, the Broslow Pediatric Resuscitation Kits, contain medications and tools for emergency situations, and even biohazard events.

The Broslow kits were suggested by the IPFD after the Kiwanis Club donated the trauma kits. While the child-sized tools were useful, it was the pre-measured medication that the department needed, although it has not yet responded to an incident in which the kits were needed.

But because the kits contains medication, which degrades over time, they need to be replaced. The replacement pack costs about $1,000 — half of what a new kit costs. But it’s money that the Kiwanis can’t raise on its own, which is why it is turning to the community. The public is welcome to attend the fundraising dinner, which is scheduled for 6 p.m. at Masone Beach. Tickets are $30 per person and include a dinner of steak, shrimp and chicken with salads, sides, dessert and beverages.

“I don’t know how many pediatric traumas [the Fire Department has],” Rubin said. “But if there’s one kid that lives because we paid $1,000 for this kit, is it worth it? I think so.”