Our Mission
Parent Heart Watch is the national organization solely dedicated to protecting children and young from sudden cardiac arrest and preventable sudden cardiac death by educating and advocating for change.
Our Vision
Eliminate preventable deaths and disabilities from sudden cardiac arrest in children and young adults.
Our Purpose
WE CULTIVATE LOCAL CHAMPIONS
throughout the nation who create community programs that drive the groundswell of demand for SCA prevention.
WE ARCHITECT COLLABORATIONS
that convert passive heart safety protocol in youth education, sports and medical communities into proactive prevention strategies.
WE MOTIVATE PARENTS
to engage in neighborhood prevention (doctors, coaches, schools friends and family) to advance their own child's well-being.
Parent Heart Watch is a dynamic and transformative platform that cultivates courageous champions by transitioning them from debilitating grief, or by marshaling the power of their survivorship, and empowers them to create life-saving community programs. Joined by passionate prevention champions, medical and allied health professionals, this union has been the inspiration for groundbreaking research studies to fill the critical void of data on youth lost to SCA, as well as important collaborations and coalitions that advance prevention. Our comprehensive education and compelling best practice models have inspired the creation of model primary and secondary prevention programs in nearly every state and over 100 communities across the nation, impacting more than a million youth and counting. Our program drives the national dialogue on youth SCA/SCD prevention, with PHW continually working to motivate education, sports, medical and policy-making stakeholders to address a syndrome The Wall Street Journal has called “one of medicine’s most catastrophic and little-understood events.”
Our Focus
- Raising awareness of SCA and its true incidence in young people,
- Promoting preventive heart screenings for early detection of risk factors and heart conditions that may lead to SCA or SCD,
- Training laypeople to recognize and respond to a cardiac emergency—Call-Push-Shock,
- Ensuring widespread and proper placement of automated external defibrillators (AEDs),
- Developing written and practiced cardiac emergency response plans where young people gather, and
- Advocating for a mandatory registry tracking SCA/SCD incidence in youth.
Our History
Parent Heart Watch was founded by four mothers who lost a seemingly healthy child to sudden cardiac arrest. They came together from different parts of the country, to honor their children’s memory. From this grassroots movement sprang a national organization dedicated to protecting youth from SCA. The Medtronic Foundation, our founding sponsor, provided a generous grant to support the inaugural meeting of the organization in Las Vegas. Since 2005, Parent Heart Watch has continued to tell the true stories of the devastation SCA has on our youth, as well as stories of survivors who are alive because of primary or secondary prevention strategies.
Parent Heart Watch is a 501(c)3.