You could save a life if you knew how - sign up here for vital CPR training

Coun Peter Gibson with Richard Avenue School Year 4 pupils l-r Malia Bruce, Maria Begum, Miguel Clemente and Aaron Mackie, all aged 9.

An appeal for more people, of all ages and in all communities, to learn how to save lives, has been launched.

If you are not sure what you should do if someone near you has a heart attack, here is your chance to learn.

North East Ambulance Service asks schools, community groups and organisations to register for cardiopulmonary resuscitation training, as part of Restart a Heart, coming up in October.

The deadline for people to register for this valuable training is September 20, 2019.

Restart a Heart is a campaign to raise awareness of the importance of CPR, and see more than 200,000 people trained up.

This all began after figures revealed that less than one in 10 people in Britain survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, due to low bystander CPR rates.

But in countries where CPR is taught in schools, as many as one in four survive.

CPR is very important as the time it takes for emergency services to arrive, can mean the difference between life and death.

Brain tissue starts to die within three minutes after the heart stops, due to a lack of oxygen.

Early CPR can more than double a person’s chances of survival and can buy time.

Over 30,000 people suffer a cardiac arrest out of hospital in the UK every year. Shockingly, less than one in 10 survive.

Alex Mason, community development officer at NEAS, said: “There is nothing more disheartening to an ambulance crew than arriving on scene to a patient where CPR is not in progress, when it could have been.”

Find out more at: https://www.neas.nhs.uk/get-involved/restart-a-heart.aspx