The greatest kiss of all is the kiss of life
Our Head of Policy and Advocacy, Maura Gillespie, blogs
about why we need to create generations of new lifesavers.
Tuesday 2 August, 2011
Kissing is something I’ve been interested in
since I was 10 and boys suddenly became appealing, even if
they were dancing to Wham! at the annual school disco. But this
year I’ve been more passionate about it than ever because I’ve
headed up a campaign calling on government to make it
mandatory for all children to learn how to save a
life before they leave school. I’d love to see every
single young person in the UK able to give the kiss of life.
The figures that got me interested in this
campaign are huge. Each year in the UK, around 30,000 people have a
cardiac arrest outside of hospital. That means for whatever reason
their heart stops pumping blood around their body in the way that
it should. Nearly half of all cardiac arrests are actually
witnessed by a member of the public or a relative.
Unfortunately not enough people know what to do in that
situation and more than 27,000 of these patients never leave
hospital alive. That’s just a 10 per cent chance of
survival.
We want to see ELS become a mandatory part of the curriculum in each UK nation
But there is way to
improve those terrible odds and it’s our children who can be the
difference between life and death. Put simply, if every young
person in the UK were to leave school knowing
Emergency Life Support (ELS)
skills, lives would be saved. I’m talking about
very
simple skills, including cardiopulmonary resuscitation
(CPR), and how to deal with an unconscious person; serious
bleeding; choking; and how to recognise the signs and symptoms of a
heart attack.
Making this a reality
doesn’t have to mean the creation of an additional subject or
asking for other important lessons to be scrapped. Effective
training can be delivered to children in schools in just a
single two hour session, repeated annually.
More than 600,000 secondary school students
leave school each year, so that’s more than half a million pairs of
hands that could help save someone’s life. This will unquestionably
make a huge difference to survival
rates.
In recent months, we've been
talking to Resuscitation Council UK
(RCUK) about the problem and together and together we’re calling
for ELS skills to be taught within all secondary
schools. Where possible, we want to see ELS become a
mandatory part of the curriculum in each UK nation.
Widespread support
We recently
commissioned a survey to see if teachers, parents and children
wanted to see ELS in the classroom. The results revealed
overwhelming support. More than four in five teachers believe ELS
skills should be taught in school, and 70 per cent of parents
agree. It also showed more than half of kids are powerless
to help someone who has collapsed in the street despite
three quarters wanting to be able to help.
It’s clearly an idea with widespread
support but what evidence is there that it will work?
Well, Seattle is a perfect example of how
teaching these types of skills in school can save
lives. The US city has been teaching CPR in its schools
for more than 30 years. Half the population is now trained in CPR
and survival rates for witnessed cardiac arrests have risen to an
impressive 46 per cent. Seattle has realised that school is about
teaching our children the skills they will need and use throughout
their life and, as a result, they’re so far ahead of the UK in
terms of survival rates it’s embarrassing.
August 2 is National
Kissing Day and a great way to poke fun at the fact Brits are
apparently losing their passion for a daily game of tonsil tennis.
But it also serves as a timely reminder that the greatest kiss
anyone can ever give is the kiss of life.
Support our
campaign