Charlie Denham, III
High School Student
Co-founder Med Tac Chairman High School Student Outreach
Junior Med Tac Instructor
Laguna Beach, CA

Charlie Denham is a high school student who lives in Southern California.  As a Cub Scout he aspired to undertake an Eagle Scout Project before becoming a boy scout. So he undertook development Med Tac for scouts as an independent service project. He and his father developed the program and tested the CARE Huddle Checklist with his own Cub Scout den, his flag football team, and then his school with a wonderful teacher who was an Eagle Scout and Cub Scout leader. Together starting in 2015 they verified that the knowledge about high impact care hazards and that bystander lifeline behaviors can be learned by children as young as third graders through multiple Med Tac after school and summer school programs.   

Charlie is a 2018 Pete Conrad Global Patient Safety Award winner for co-founding Med Tac and his role in pioneering the program for schools, churches, and scout groups after presenting the program at an innovation summit at the NASA Kennedy Space Center. Charlie is commonly seen in the Med Tac training videos and as a speaker in Med Tac national broadcasts designed to reach his age group. He has learned the value of Bystander Care through the experiences he has had during Junior Lifeguard training and his participation in competitive climbing, fencing, flag football, surfing, and on Scout adventures. He is participating on the multi-generational Med Tac team to develop its Survive & Thrive programs to deal with the coronavirus crisis and co-leads our scout education initiatives. He is a co-author of many of our Med Tac related articles and is developing a KIDLEADERS program for school children. He co-developed the Holiday Lifeguard Program to deal with the Coronavirus Crisis and family infection transmission chains during the Q4 surge of 2020 that was re-deployed during the 2021 Delta Variant surge.  Charlie is the chairman of the Med Tac National High School Outreach program that is establishing chapters in five states. He was the high school team leader of the Take the Shot…Save a Life program for schools and colleges. An avid waterman, he was certified as one of the youngest PADI Rescue Divers in the nation. An aspiring competitive surfer, he is a Junior Med Tac Instructor and helps lead the Med Tac Divers and Lifeguard-Surf Programs in California and Hawaii. His Med Tac Rescue Station Eagle Scout project placed rescue stations with Automated External Defibrillators and trauma care supplies at a California beach. It was the first of a number of such placements and spawned the development of the Med Tac Eagle Squadron of Eagle Scout candidates who are placing rescue stations at Southern California beaches to reduce resuscitation times to “3 Minutes from Drop to Shock”. As a co-founder of Med Tac, he has had the opportunity as a junior instructor to teach at Stanford University, in his own school, and scouting community.