Heartwize

‘What would you do if someone collapses unconscious in front of you?’

The aim of the Rotary HeartWize programme is to allay the fears of getting involved, by giving you the knowledge and basic skills to maintain life until the emergency services can get there.

HeartWize aims to spread knowledge of CPR (cardio-pulmonary resuscitation) across communities in our district. This can be through Rotary clubs, schools, community groups, businesses, indeed any organisation. Some of you may remember Dr Doug Skehan’s superb presentations at District conference at Nottingham and District Assembly at Loughborough on the subject.

The Heartwize-Rotary team has run demonstrations of life-saving skills, or has dates to do so, at about one third of the clubs in the district, averaging well over 20 attendees at each even taking an active part in hands-on CPR and using defibrillators. Clubs have invited participation by people from non-Rotary community groups. People taking part have universally found the events to be informative, enjoyable and potentially very useful (even though we all hope no-one will have cause to use the skills they have learned!).

Clubs now have people trained as trainers – able to lead one of the several training groups at each of the events we run, under the leadership of the Heartwize team itself. They have purchased set of CPR mannequins to support the training (partially paid for by The Rotary Foundation). We are encouraging Rotarians from other clubs to come forward to attend “train the trainer” sessions, and in due course spread the learning of CPR to other community groups across the district. This will take place with support from Heartwize.

We are very grateful to the Heartwize team, especially Dr Skehan, Dr Toff and Julie Young, event coordinator and trainer for Heartwize. But we cannot expect them alone to carry out all the training we might like for our communities across the whole of our district.

So, we would like to hear from any club that would like a speaker, presentation, and/or training. Also, from any Rotarian that would like to be involved, as part of a small team, to train local community groups in your area.