St John kept CPR going for 12 hours

Saturday 23 June 2018

The St John Emergency Ambulance Service held a CPR Marathon yesterday at Beau Sejour where CPR was carried out continuously from 08:00 to 20:00.

Teams from local businesses and organisations signed up to complete one hour time slots of resuscitation throughout the day, and members of the public also joined in as staff were on hand to demonstrate on the concourse.

Employees from the St John Emergency Ambulance Service and the Guernsey Cardiac Action Group demonstrated the CPR to people. Ali Marquis, Chief Officer for St John, said it was a great opportunity to learn "an important life-saving skill".

"We have a number of things going on this year to try and raise money for our new emergency ambulance appeal, this CPR marathon is one of them, the aim is to have continuous CPR on mannequins for 12 hours and we have a number of organisations signed up to do and practice continuous CPR." 

"We have had a lot of interest from people and have teams set throughout the day including an ambulance going out to the schools to teach them CPR and around 170 pupils taking part and five teams from College for Further Education. The event has been made possible as Heritage have sponsored it."

Pictured: A team from AFM who were one of the companies taking part in the marathon.

"We want to try and raise awareness with the public to try and get a bit of knowledge of CPR so if they are ever in a situation where they have a loved one or member of the family who is not breathing if they phone for an ambulance they will also be advised to give CPR over the telephone, so this event is great to increase awareness of what they can do." 

The CPR Marathon is also raising funds for a new emergency ambulance to replace the oldest vehicle in their fleet. The ambulance will be a modern treatment centre, stocked with life-saving equipment, diagnostic tools and medical kits which will allow Paramedics and Emergency Medical Technicians to deliver advanced pre-hospital emergency care around the island.

Ms Marquis said: "it is of major importance to us, we need the up to date vehicles with the most up to date equipment in it. They do significant milage and need to be replaced. We hope to have the new ambulance in service by the end of the year."

"State of the art vehicles like this cost between £140,000 and £150,000, we hope the new ambulance will be kitted out with mobile technology meaning if we have done an ECG on a patient on the way to hospital we can send that to the emergency department to aid handover of patients."

Pictured top: Ali Marquis, Chief Officer, St John Emergency Ambulance Service