Buckinghamshire students learn CPR with ambulance service on Restart a Heart Day

Students across Buckinghamshire were shown how to perform CPR and use a defibrillator on Friday 16 October, as part of Restart a Heart Day. The sessions were delivered by staff from South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS), alongside community first responders and co-responders who gave up their own time.

Restart a Heart Day is an annual event aimed at raising awareness of cardiac arrest and helping more people learn CPR. SCAS set itself a target of training 13,000 students in total, with sessions running at around 100 schools across Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Hampshire.

The trust says there are nearly 30,000 cases each year in which someone has a cardiac arrest outside hospital and treatment is attempted, and that fewer than one in ten of those people survive. Skills learned in a school hall are the kind that make a difference in those first few minutes.

A paramedic and operations manager at SCAS described the day as one of the most important in the trust's community engagement calendar, because it gives thousands of young people both the skills and the confidence to save a life, and thanked the responders and staff who volunteered their time to make the effort possible.