The British Heart Foundation has launched a campaign to educate the nation on CPR and help save 5,000 lives a year. Recent research by Warwick University has shown that over half of adults wouldn’t feel confident performing CPR on a person who required resuscitation.
This means that only four out of 10 bystanders who witnessed a cardiac arrest would perform CPR. This compared to 73% in Norway, where CPR is taught in all schools.
For someone suffering cardiac arrest – the signs of which include difficulty breathing and being unresponsive – every minute without CPR or resuscitation using a defribrillator lessens a chance of survival by 10% – after 10 minutes people stand just 2% of surviving a heart attack.
30,000 cardiac arrests occur outside of hospital in the UK each year, often in the home. More than half adults surveyed said they wouldn’t know what to do, and worried that they would make matters worse by getting it wrong – although in reality doing nothing is far worse.
The British Heart Foundation is launching a scheme educating more than 35,000 schoolchildren across the UK on how to recognize whether someone is suffering a heart attack and how to perform CPR. By matching rates in Norway the charity says 5,000 extra lives would be saved each year.