Growing up in rural Indiana, Basil Heintzman saw first-hand the healthcare inequities faced by residents of smaller communities.
When a family friend suffered a heart attack while toiling in a community garden, her dad decided to put him in his vehicle and rush him to the nearest large town, Bloomington, to get the care he needed to survive. The doctor shared that if they had arrived just 10 minutes later, the outcome might have been different.
“If they would have called for an ambulance, it would have taken too long to get there,” she said. “That’s how rural it was.”
In August 2023, after graduating from Indiana University, Basil joined HeartCorps at Story County Public Health in Ames, Iowa, serving the county’s 15 communities spread across more than 570 square miles. The American Heart Association (AHA) operates the AmeriCorps program, HeartCorps.
Basil saw many of those same inequities in rural Iowa, but with HeartCorps she had “the tools and the support system to be able to do something about it.”
Basil loved providing Hands-Only CPR training and setting up shop at small-town locales such as the Slater Public Library, where people could drop by and chat as they browsed for books.
“It takes only five minutes to learn Hands-Only CPR. It’s very, very, very simple,” she said. “And so, it’s like, ‘Would you want to take five minutes to save a life?’”
Basil at a HeartCorps training
Basil packaged the training with AHA EmPOWERED to Serve™ presentations on recognizing and surviving a heart attack or cardiac arrest. She shared facts about how heart disease is the No. 1 killer of Americans and that someone in the U.S. has a heart attack every 40 seconds.
“It really drives home the message of why this is important to know and how, as much as we would hope not, it really could be that someone they know has a heart attack or cardiac arrest,” Basil said. “And they should know what to do about it.”
Basil completed her HeartCorps assignment in 2024 to enroll in medical school at the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine, gaining new skills to continue her commitment to advancing rural healthcare. In her first semester, she developed a heart health education project for local libraries—a project that was inspired by her work at HeartCorps.
The American Heart Association operates the Americorps program, HeartCorps. Read more HeartCorps stories here.