Youngsters at a Bury high school have been taught how to save a life as part of a pilot scheme that could be spread across the UK.
Year 7 pupils at The Derby High School have been trained in how to stop a life-threatening bleed last week as part of a scheme to help fill the "care gap" between an incident and the arrival of the emergency services.
Nigel Barraclough, a paramedic and trustee for the Citizen Aid charity, led the practical training at Derby High.
He said: “Hopefully it will never come to it but I would be very surprised if somebody we taught didn't have to use these skills at some point in the future.
“There is what we call a ‘care gap’, which was witnessed, unfortunately, at the Manchester Arena attack, which is the gap between the incident and the arrival of the emergency services.
“We know it is a problem so we decided to create a charity to enable members of the public to aid injured people in those instances.
“This charity was made with mass casualty incidents in mind but with such as knife crime across Great Manchester, the skills are invaluable.”
Nigel taught pupils lifesaving skills in 30-minute slots across the day and praised pupils for their engagement and for “not being scared".
He also took part in a first aid training video alongside Derby High Year 7 student Fin Maher, which can be watched for free.
Speaking about the video, Finn said: “As well as creating the video, we helped to make it better suited for people our age and let them know what would work best.”
Fellow Year 7 student Abu-Bakr Farooq added: “It has been useful to learn, I didn’t know you could use a phone to help tie a tourniquet and how to identify a life-threatening bleed before.
“If the person has lost around half a can of pop’s worth of blood you need to phone an ambulance, apply pressure and when the blood has started to clot, tie a tourniquet.”
Dr Rachel Jenner, the clinical lead for the Greater Manchester Violence Reduction Unit, praised pupils at the school adding that they had been “fantastic and “really engaged”.
She said: “The Derby High School in Bury helped to design the teaching programmes.
“Pupils co-designed the programme and they've also helped us produce a training video, we've learned a lot from them and hopefully we've been able to teach them first aid skills that, that they, they may need to.”
Citizen Aid hopes that next year they can start training pupils nationally across schools, teaching around 250,000 children in one day every year.
Nigel said: “The most preventable cause of death is bleeding and it is very easy to control usually.
“It is very simple to teach and although you might not remember every step if you are in that situation, you will come away with an understanding of how to control bleeding which could quite literally save a life.”
Deputy mayor for Greater Manchester, Kate Green, said she was keen for young people to gain these skills so they would be confident in helping someone who is suffering a life-threatening bleed.
She said: “We are hoping to roll this out nationally, and after this the Year 7’s are going to be training next year's Year 7s to help schools to sustain these skills as we seek to expand it much more widely.
Bury pupils to help pilot life-saving 'Stop the Bleed Day'
Also at the event, "navigators" from Citizen Aid, which work in hospitals, A&E departments and our emergency rooms, were in attendance.
Ms Green said: “If a young person does come in having suffered a knife wound, there'll be a lot of trauma around that which is the same if they have been in a situation where they've experienced that stabbing.
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“What our navigators do is talk to them in the emergency room, find out a bit about them and give them any support they need.”
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