Heartstart across the UK – Scotland
- Nearly 260,000 people have a heart attack in the UK each year.
- Prevalence of heart attack increases with age and is higher in men than in women.
Heartstart UK in Scotland
If you’ve read about Caitlyn’s amazing feat in the ‘It's personal’ section, it’s clear that emergency life support training in schools can play a vital role in the community. But schools are only part of a successful nationwide story.
Action
Heartstart UK is a remarkable success, with over 500 schemes now in place. Some offer training to their local communities, while others offer it to specific groups such as large companies and universities. By 2005, almost 1.2 million people had been trained across the UK . Last year, 386 new groups were affiliated to the scheme.
Getting more people involved in emergency life support training is even more crucial in rural areas, where ambulance response times can be much greater and every new Heartstarter can make the difference between life and death.
In 2005, Ayrshire and Arran Heartstart celebrated a significant milestone, passing the 30,000 mark for the number of trainees – an astonishing 8% of the region’s entire population.
Heartstart UK classes take place in a wide variety of locations. But in Ayrshire they can be more unusual than most. HM Prison Bowhouse on the outskirts of Kilmarnock regularly asks for classes and the trainees always come up with real-life emergency scenarios that trainers say they’d never have dreamt of. And training cadets in local fire stations can be a challenge when the alarm goes off!
Impact
The effects of Heartstart UK are already being felt across Ayrshire. Lives have already been saved, and with 3,000 people newly trained in life-saving in 2005/06, awareness of the need for yet more Heartstarters is growing.
Next steps
In 2006, the BHF will be expanding the Heartstart UK scheme further by:
- producing new and revised support materials
- funding special posts within the ambulance service to develop and support
schools initiatives - forging new partnerships with existing community responders and other
charities to increase access to the scheme.
We also aim to audit and compare Heartstart UK schemes with existing BHF defibrillators and community responder activity across the UK. This will help us capitalise on existing interest and skills in community life-saving to establish Heartstart UK schemes in new areas.
The Heartstart UK course has also recently become part of basic training for new cadets in the Air Training Corps and the Army Cadet Force. And these recently established collaborative initiatives have the potential to train thousands of young people in vital life-saving skills.
If you would like to learn emergency life support skills, visit Heartstart UK at bhf.org.uk/hearthealth or email heartstart@bhf.org.uk