Life-saving training takes place at Dunfermline church
LIFE-SAVING training has been given to members of a Dunfermline congregation.
A team from St John Scotland visited the St Andrews Erskine Church to deliver training to the community for the new defibrillator that’s been installed at the place of worship on Roberston Road.
Carolyn Simpson, a church elder, helped to organise the training session. She told the Press: “We all hope we’re never in that situation but at least now we have an idea of what to do.
“We don’t know of another one round about that area, a defibrillator, so we just felt that the building was there and it was just something we would like to do for the community. None of us know when we might need this so we’re trying to make as many people aware as possible that it is there, should they ever need it.”
The training took place last month and was open to everyone in the community, not just those in the church. Defibrillator training, as well as CPR training, was given to all in attendance.
She continued: “The training went very well, there was six trainers and they were brilliant, I have to say. We were in little groups and half went to see how the defibrillator worked, we were shown that in detail and taken through the steps of how it works, they had one so you could see the messages you would hear if you were using it for real.
“The other half were shown how to give CPR, they had a dummy so we each got a shot of doing it ourselves to see how to do it properly. It wasn’t as easy as we thought, you had to press a lot harder than we all realised.
“It was very good and very worthwhile. St John Scotland were brilliant and everybody that was there seemed to come away saying that they were really glad that they attended, they found it useful and they just have a lot more confidence now should they ever find themselves in a position to give CPR or use the defibrillator.”
St John Scotland helped to fund the defibrillator and because of their involvement, the church was asked to put on this training session.
Carolyn added: “We were more than happy to do it because we wanted to know ourselves how things worked.”