Students and paramedics team up to raise awareness about CPR
Students from the University of Huddersfield have teamed up with the Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS) to raise public awareness around cardiac resuscitation to improve the survival prospects for people who have suffered a cardiac arrest.
Visits to schools and community events around Huddersfield, coordinated by the University’s Get Set Goal team, from nursing and Allied Health Professional courses collaborated with YAS paramedics to share knowledge on how to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
It follows research by Professor Andrew Lockey, Visiting Professor in Emergency Medicine at the University and Jason Carlyon MBE, Paramedic and Community Engagement Manager with YAS, that revealed that some areas around Kirklees had both greater incidence of cardiac arrests and low rates of bystander CPR – where emergency resuscitation is performed outside of a hospital.
“After reviewing Andy and Jason’s findings, we felt that this was an ideal opportunity for our students placed in Get Set Goal to offer Restart a Heart sessions as well,” says Sarah Shaw, Strategic Lead for Clinical and Wellbeing Services at the University's Health and Wellbeing Academy.
“Get Set Goal have been delivering these sessions to the community in Kirklees since 2022. In the last 12 months alone we have delivered 59 Restart a Heart sessions where we trained nearly 1,200 children and adults at schools and community events in some of the post codes that we identified as having lower rates of bystander CPR.
“We have delivered Restart a Heart training over the last three years at some amazing events, such as Year of Music and the National Restart a Heart Day events. Our Get Set Goal students have trained over 6,000 children and adults.”
The training sessions feature Pillow Partners, a training aid developed by YAS to enable those without access to manikins the chance to practice hands-only CPR on a pillow. The pillow cases are printed with a torso and basic CPR instructions in English, Urdu, Arabic, Punjabi and Polish.
Prompt CPR increases cardiac arrest survival chances
When a person suffers a cardiac arrest, their chances of survival significantly increase if someone performs CPR promptly, especially with the use of a defibrillator.
Jason Carlyon said, “We are really proud of our partnership with the University of Huddersfield which has resulted in many student nurses choosing to deliver CPR training as part of one of their placements and providing many school and community groups with skills that could one day save a life.”
YAS launched its Restart a Heart campaign in 2014 and since then has taught CPR to almost 300,000 people. In 2014, only 39 per cent of bystanders stepped in to do CPR at out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, but greater awareness and training has seen that figure improve to 75 per cent.
Get Set Goal is a student-supported wellbeing service from the University’s Health and Wellbeing Academy that is committed to improving the health and wellbeing of individuals and communities, supporting people to achieve personal goals by making informed, lifestyle choices through wellbeing coaching, bespoke workshops, Restart a Heart CPR training and physical health checks.
Get Set Goal offer this service to schools, third sector organisations and voluntary groups as well as businesses, public sector and health and social care.
