As part of a campaign by the London Ambulance Service (LAS) London Lifesavers team, children in Year 8 at schools in Ealing are being offered the chance to learn life-saving skills. The initiative seeks to make London as a whole one of the best cities in the world at responding to cardiac arrest.
According to the LAS, the London Borough of Ealing has the second lowest bystander CPR rates in London, as well as a high number of cardiac arrest patients, with low rates of survival. As a result, the LAS have prioritised the borough to be one of the first targeted.
The campaign will teach children the vital skills of recognising cardiac arrest, how to give chest compressions and how to use a defibrillator which is able to restart a heart.
The London Lifesavers schools programme is offered free of charge by LAS to schools as it hopes to grow the number of people capable of responding to cardiac arrests.
Sam Palfreyman-Jones, Head of First Responders, said: “We know that by teaching life-saving skills in schools in Ealing and giving the children the confidence to use a defibrillator, more lives will be saved in those crucial minutes before an ambulance arrives.”
She added: “Most cardiac arrests happen in the home, so we hope to show children that by learning these simple skills, they could save someone they love.”
The LAS highlighted other big cities such as Copenhagen and Seattle as well as the state of Victoria in Australia, as examples of places in which survival rates have improved due to bystander intervention.
As well as reaching out to schools, the London Lifesavers team also run pop-up events across London to train the public and offer training to various businesses, charities and community organisations.
