Volunteers teach life-saving skills

The group is made up of volunteers who carry out the training courses in their own time.

The body has run life-saving skills courses in Tayside since 1997, giving training to a total of 100,000 people to date.

Seventeen people attended a course at King’s Cross Hospital on Clepington Road, Dundee, last Wednesday evening.

It covered actions to take if someone – adult or child – is unconscious, not breathing, bleeding or choking.

Susan Donlevy, Heartstart trainer and specialist nurse at Ninewells Hospital, said: “This course is about potentially saving a life by helping until the emergency services arrive. “It’s all about buying time. “Good bystander CPR can make a real difference to someone’s outcome.” The only time I’d seen CPR performed was in episodes of Casualty, peeking through fingers during the gory scenes.

So I only had a vague idea of what to expect at Heartstart Discovery’s life-saving skills course in Dundee.

I was anxious about revealing my clumsiness by damaging the dummy or worse, breaking someone’s ribs during the exercises.

I needn’t have worried, as the workshop was delivered in a practical, easy-to-follow way, with a sprinkling of humour throughout.

The coordinators demonstrated each step before splitting us up into groups to try it out ourselves.

We practised checking someone’s breathing, putting them in the recovery position and performing chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth.

There was also a lesson on helping someone who is choking or bleeding, plus a very helpful question-and-answer session at the end.

Previously, I would have been reluctant to step in if I saw a person collapsed on the street, for fear of making them worse.

Although by no means an expert now, I’d feel more confident about coming forward and helping – and those first few minutes after an incident could be critical.