Jamie Arrowsmith – Monday 14th October 2023 – 9am.
It isn’t just our paramedics who have the ability to save a life – everybody does, with the help of some simple training.
This Restart A Heart Day, West Midlands Ambulance Service is encouraging as many people as possible to learn how to do CPR as you never know when it might be your turn to try and save a life.
Restart A Heart Day, which is organised by the Resuscitation Council UK (RCUK) and takes place on Wednesday (October 16th) is designed to teach as many people as possible how to do CPR, an essential skill that can be the difference between life and death when someone suffers a cardiac arrest.
WMAS staff and Community First Responders will be out and about across the region all week with the aim of teaching thousands of people the lifesaving skill including in many schools, to help raise awareness of why CPR is so important from an early age.
To help boost the numbers, RCUK has launched a new CPR awareness campaign called ResusReady. The campaign calls on businesses who offer their staff CPR training to pledge to being Resus Ready.
By signing up, businesses and individuals will be given the opportunity to appear on an interactive heat map, allowing RCUK to identify where gaps in CPR training and defibrillator awareness still exist in the UK.
WMAS Community Response Manager, Cliff Medlicott, said: “In the UK, only around one in seven people survive an out of hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), much lower than other parts of world. Half of OHCA are witnessed and by having early bystander CPR it is shown to more than double the chances of survival.
“Whilst coming across a cardiac arrest is scary, we all have the ability to do something incredible and try and save a life, by learning how to do CPR.
“Performing CPR buys the patient time until the ambulance service gets there. It’s really important to realise that you cannot hurt the person, doing something can only help.”
More can be read about ResusReady on their website, whilst a CPR demonstration is shown on the YouTube video.