A national education drive aims to improve the survival rate of cardiac arrests by bolstering the number of people trained in CPR and defibrillator use.
Resuscitation Council UK (RCUK) has announced the reopening of its Community Grant Scheme, which offers grants of up to £1,500 to small charities as well as community and faith groups across the UK.
It comes as approximately 40,000 people in the UK suffer a sudden cardiac arrest outside of hospital every year, with survival rates of less than one in ten.
The initiative aims to bolster the number of people trained in life-saving CPR and defibrillator use, as new research shows nearly one in three (31%) don’t know what to do if faced with a situation where someone is unconscious and not breathing normally.
Furthermore, while defibrillators can double the chances of survival, 42% of people said they would feel uncomfortable using one.
One of the sessions aimed to change that is being held at Dundee International Women’s Centre, where women plan to learn how to make those first few minutes count.
STV News“They said it will be helpful if you at least do something, instead of doing nothing. It will still help. I think I’m more confident than before”, explains one of the women taking part in the lesson.
“I did it many years ago, but now it’s good to be able to come back and refresh it all, because you could forget things over the years,” adds another.
This class is particularly important here at the city’s international women’s centre, as rates of heart disease are known to be higher among certain ethnic minority communities.
“The women who come here, a lot of them, are quite isolated. A lot of them don’t speak English very well,” says Susan A’Brook, an evaluation and impact officer at the Dundee International Women’s Centre.
“They lack confidence, and they often wouldn’t access services anywhere else.
“So, having the training actually here means that a lot more women will come and take advantage of it.”
These sessions aim to bridge the gap between official advice and putting that into practice, with the hope being that by arming more people with the skills they need to act, they could be the difference between life and death.
STV News“What we know is that every minute that passes is vital – for every minute that nothing is done, somebody’s chance of survival decreases by 10%,” explains RCUK’s CEO Dr James Cant.
“The biggest determinant of somebody’s survival is what members of the public do in those first moments, first minutes when somebody has a cardiac arrest.
“So, what we need to do is make sure that people have the skills and have the confidence to step up and make that difference.”
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