Meeting of the Parliament 27 November 2013
I congratulate James Dornan on securing the debate on an important issue and I echo his thanks to St Andrew’s First Aid for the work that it does. He has gone into detail about the count me in campaign, which sends out the important message that no one should die because they needed first aid and did not get it.
It is important to raise awareness of how first aid can save lives. People can show their support for that by signing the pledge online, reading first aid information, organising a first aid training event in their local area or volunteering with St Andrew’s First Aid in their community. As James Dornan said, volunteers work at loads of different events, from sporting events to music festivals and the like.
It is very easy to become a volunteer; being a volunteer means that a person gets the opportunity to learn those vital lifesaving skills. However, if people do not want to be on the front line—perhaps they are afraid that they might panic—they can volunteer to take on other jobs including administration, youth leadership, fund raising and public relations. Those jobs are vital to the voluntary organisation: it is important that its staff are free to train people to be first aiders.
Some years ago, I undertook—with some nervousness, because one never knows what situations one might be confronted with—St Andrew’s first aid training. I kept asking the trainer difficult questions on what would happen if such-and-such were to happen. The eventual answer—the trainer spoke with a slight tone of exasperation—was that if someone is dead, a person cannot kill them anymore, so there is nothing that a person can do in a situation in which help is needed apart from do their very best. That put the matter in context for me; everybody needs to take that message on board and learn the skills.
The first and foremost skill that everyone should learn is to dial 999, because no matter how honed one’s CPR skills are, a person can continue that only for a short time before assistance is needed. We need to get those very basic messages through to people.
Young people who are leaving care are sometimes taught those skills. Although that is important, it is equally important to teach the skills to all our young people, so that they know the basics, know to phone 999 and know to get involved. They should also be braver at picking up some of the information that comes to us through public campaigns.
We are all aware of the British Heart Foundation’s “Stayin’ Alive” campaign on hands-on CPR. However, people get confused and wonder what they should be doing during an incident. We therefore should have clear messages that join up all first aid training and public health information, so that people know what to do.
Another very useful campaign was the National Advisory Committee on Stroke’s FAST—“Face. Arms. Speech. Time”—campaign about helping people identify strokes. People often see people who are suffering a stroke and think that they are drunk or tired. The FAST campaign showed people how to check for the signs of a stroke and sought to give them the right tools, so that they would feel a bit braver about intervening, and to make them aware of the need to get help, because getting help quickly is vital to everybody in a first aid situation.
There are also community resilience campaigns; for example, the Scottish Ambulance Service is installing defibrillators in the community. I am also aware that local general practitioners are helping communities to raise funds and are training people how to use the defibrillators, which can save lives.
I welcome the debate for those reasons. I very much hope that St Andrew’s achieves its target of 34,000 signatures. I hope that its campaign will also raise awareness and that more people will be encouraged to take on the skills and save lives as a result.
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