I am trying to understand why people don't want to learn first aid. It seems odd to me that when it can take as little of 3 hours of someone's life to learn how to save another life, there are so few people that opt to do this. Is it cost? surely not as it is just about the same cost as a reasonably inexpensive dinner. Maybe it is fear or more likely the head in the sand approach "It won't happen to me." way of thinking. 

 

 A GP receptionist  who  had recently attended a Safe and Sound First Aid  Training Course told us that just a few weeks afterward they had their annual refresher training with Safe and Sound a man had walked into the surgery complaining of chest pains. He then collapsed and died 3 times before they managed to save him. "We started CPR immediately while someone went for the defibrillator and then attached him to administer the shocks," explained the receptionist.  Paramedics told them had they not been trained the man would not be alive today.  

 

Luckily Sue did know first aid. And when her  husband collapsed, turned grey and stopped breathing she knew exactly what to do. Everything she had learnt on a first aid course at her nursery school a few years ago kicked in and after calling 999 she started CPR (cardio pulmonary resuscitation).

“It’s amazing how when the adrenalin starts flowing you just do what you have to and I remembered the trainer at the nursery telling us that resuscitation was exactly the same for children as adults except for the rescue breaths at the beginning and that we needed to be more forceful when working with adults. I also remember the trainer telling us not to worry about breaking any ribs because broken ribs are not as serious as dying, which is just as well as I broke two of my husband’s ribs.”

What most surprised Sue was her quick reaction and the fact that without thinking she followed the DRSABC procedure she had been taught. “The dog was running wildly around my husband’s head and so I first locked him in another room before starting to resuscitate.”

Her husband Chris had a major heart attack. Sue resuscitated for 20 minutes until the paramedics arrived and it then took them 2 hours to stabilise Chris, who they four times, before they could transfer him to the ambulance. He has since made a full recovery.

Chris is 42, slim, and certainly doesn’t look like a heart attack victim, apart from smoking too much which he has now given up.

“Both Sue and I feel that everybody should do a first aid course because something could happen at any time,” says Chris. Maybe not a heart attacks but an accident, a child choking, drowning, or getting a head injury, and if you know what to do, whether it is resuscitation, or anything else, it could save a life. Let’s face it I am very very lucky to be here and if Sue hadn’t been on a first aid course I probably wouldn’t be.”

Sue explains that Chris woke up in the middle of the night with a headache.

“I didn’t think anything because he had had a headache for the past two days. But then he said that he felt very weird and he asked me to come downstairs with him because he felt scared. I thought that was very odd and unlike Chris.

“I thought I couldn’t take him to hospital just with a headache so I was on the phone to NHS direct when he collapsed. The dog was going crazy going round and round Chris’s head so I put the him away in another room and called 999.

“I realised that Chris was going grey and couldn’t breathe, so I started to do CPR. Everything from the course at the nursery came back to me. I remembered the breaths to chest compressions, knew that if it was an adult I needed to be forceful and I just went on auto pilot.

“The 999 people were very helpful talking me through the steps. It took 10 minutes for the ambulance to arrive and I just kept doing the CPR. When the doorbell rang I didn’t know what to do, should I answer it or carry on with CPR? The 999 people said just leave him quickly.

“It took 2 hours for the paramedics to stabilise Chris so they could transfer him to hospital. They had lost him 4 times. They told me that if I hadn’t had done CPR my husband would have just died. And if I hadn’t have been on a course I really wouldn’t have known what to do. It just all came back to me instantly, even though we had done it on child dummies.

“It was very scary and it was only when the paramedics arrived and took over that I thought thank goodness it is out of my hands now.

“So many of my friends have gone on first aid courses now because they have told me that they wouldn’t have known what to do had it happened to them and that their husbands would probably have been dead by the time the paramedics arrived.

 

Call us on 0208 445 8998 to book a first aid course

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