As Teachers you have a huge daily responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of your pupils.  Learning simple life saving skills could save a childs or one of your colleagues life.  Safe Hands provides training to teaching staff and tailored courses designed for pupils.

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Our courses include, but are not exhaustive:

 

• Choking

• Chest Pain

• Cardiac arrest

• AED

• Anaphylaxis

• Asthma

• Seizure

• Hypogylcaemia

• Stroke

• First Aid

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270 children die every year of sudden cardiac arrest at school, yet often nobody starts CPR because they don’t know what to do. By the time the emergency services arrive valuable time has been lost and, in many cases, the chance of survival has been lost also.

Where better to start to correct this than with our school children? The Government has shown some concern; last year the Department for Education introduced a scheme enabling schools to purchase defibrillators at reduced cost. However, defibrillators alone are unlikely to save lives unless people who see or find someone when they collapse call 999 and start CPR immediately. If a defibrillator can then be used before the arrival of the ambulance service, the chance of survival increases dramatically.

 

Does this approach work?

In 2005, CPR training became compulsory for all Danish schoolchildren over 11 years of age. In the next 6 years, the provision of CPR by members of the public more than doubled and survival from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest tripled. In Stockholm, when members of the public started CPR and used a defibrillator before the arrival of an ambulance 70% of people survived but, when resuscitation was delayed until an ambulance arrived, only 31% survived.

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We recognise the pressures on teachers to deliver a busy curriculum and are not proposing time-consuming additions. . Many schools around the country have taken the initiative and introduced training with great success. The time has come to make this important life skill part of every child’s education so that, when faced with a collapsed person, they will be confident and competent to intervene and, whenever possible, save a life.