This month, Freedom Leisure, one of the UK’s leading not-for-profit leisure trust that manages over 130 leisure centres across England and Wales will be supporting ‘Restart a Heart’ – a nationwide initiative to improve survival rates from out-of-hospital cardiac arrests.
Each year, approximately 30,000 people suffer an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest – that’s around 84 individuals every day. But survival rates are low, with just one in ten people recovering.
The Resuscitation Council UK (RCUK) and an alliance of first aid organisations, including Royal Life Saving Society UK (RLSS UK) and other charitable and public sector community- based organisations and first aid training organisations, lead the campaign.
Freedom Leisure will support the campaign by hosting activities at its venues on Thursday 16th October, that will teach basic life saving techniques of CPR and defibrillator use to its customers. They’ll be utilising resources designed and distributed by RLSS UK to ensure people have the skills and confidence to perform CPR.
We’re thrilled to be part of Restart a Heart. This is a really important campaign, it’s a chance to equip our community with the confidence and skills to save lives as we do for our colleagues across the organisation with over 600 of our people First Aid trained including the skills of CPR and defibrillator use. We would like all our customers and visitors to learn CPR.
Ivan Horsfall-Turner
We have been supporting the Restart a Heart campaign for a number of years, but we have been actively encouraging leisure operators to get more involved this year, as there are still concerningly high numbers of individuals who have never learnt CPR and it is a really important skill to know in any situation. We hope that by supporting the leisure industry in spreading the important messages integral to the Restart a Heart campaign, more people will be confident in dealing with an emergency safely.
Nick Grazier
For more about the Restart a Heart campaign, visit www.rlss.org.uk/ or to learn more about how to deliver CPR, visit www.rlss.org.uk/learn-cpr.