Vinnie Jones and CPR

[Christel]

We did the course yesterday evening, best 2 hours I have spent this year. If you can find this course near you, do yourself a favour and attend. No, actually do people around you a favour and attend!

Make sure you are one of the people who responds to a situation and don't be a bystander.

[artiglio]

Morning Christel,

Finished my course last week and came a way with the following opinions/pearls of wisdom

- chance of survival after heart attack in the street 7%
- one hospital trust has raised it's "on ward" heart attack survival rates from 30% to 75% by having automatic defibrillators on every ward, rather than a crash kart on each floor. The 2 minute improvement in response time has huge benefit.
- the much trumpeted decrease in road deaths in the uk, has been attributable as much to better health care as to road safety. But the cost to NHS is huge and this does not include the air ambulances which are funded by charity and in themselves have reduced death rate from road accidents.
- NHS trusts have target response time of 8 minutes for 999 calls, this can be met if first contact is from unpaid volunteers who have sufficient training.
- it has been estimated that upto 75% of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster may have survived had their airways been maintained.
-public awareness, healthier living and improvements in treatment have had a huge impact on deaths from heart attack, as seen from headlines over last few days. It is hoped that education programmes in relation to strokes are just as effective.

Last but not least, if you're going to have a heart attack whilst out shopping try and have it in B+Q, their stores are far more likely to have an AED than any other retail outlet. Directly as a result of employing older people and having the pensioner discount day, risk assessments showed provision of AED was desirable.

All the best phil

[Ovenpaa]

I do my first aid in the office course every three years and it gives an over view of emergency first aid including CPR. Last time I did it the course was run by a fireman who admitted he had performed CPR on a few occasions but was yet to see someone come out the other side OK, now this could be down to the state of the person he was working on but it was not a good statistic. He did say regardless of this he treated every person he gave CPR as the one that was going to live and worked as hard as he could to preserve that life.