Heart Start Cowal

The Heartstart Cowal group (volunteers) provide free of charge Emergency Basic Life Support Training (including conscious & unconscious patients, severe bleeding, choking, CPR, and defibrillation) to all members of our Cowal based communities including: - schoolchildren, young adults, all community groups, and of course adult members of the public. Although we are supported by Argyll & Bute Social Care partnership and Save A Life for Scotland, we are entirely self-funding.

Every year approximately 3,140 people in Scotland alone will have an out of hospital cardiac arrest with circa 10% of those surviving. That is opposed to around 1,650 (2023) road death fatalities throughout the entire United Kingdom. 8 out of 10 of these cardiac arrests occur at home.

Our primary aim is to ensure with every person has sufficient confidence and competence to assist persons in difficulties as the first person on scene and reduce the out of hospital cardiac deaths. Furthermore, we hope that attendees who are successful at our sessions will go onto becoming Goodsam Responders who support The Scottish Ambulance Service locally, but are in fact a worldwide responder group themselves. Should an ambulance crew not be available for whatever reason, Responders can be called into assist. Several members of our group are also Goodsam Responders.

Heartstart is not a new initiative in Cowal, but it has been resurrected in September 2023 after Covid 19 effectively ended all operations. As a result, we have inherited some training equipment of an age and standard, which needs updating (but nevertheless remains serviceable). We now have some 12 trained Heartstart instructors (several are serving Dunoon paramedics, retired nurses and community responders) and are embarking on numerous public and community group training sessions shortly, starting with 4 public sessions in March based at our training home, Dunoon Fire Station (who kindly allow us to utilise their training room free of charge). We will also be shortly running courses at The Hub in Dunoon as part of Argyll & Bute Living Well programme.

To date though we have taught at Toward and Strachur Primary Schools, Dunoon Police Young Volunteer Service, a public session at Strachur Memorial Hall and another at Dunoon Fire Station. We aim to work with around 300 new members of the public over the next 12 months or so, and of course promote our work through social media, Argyll & Bute council etc. We are also in discussions with Dunoon Grammar School to create a “buddy” system which will not only train the students to be first on scene persons but facilitate them in helping us deliver the training courses in certain circumstances (under supervision).

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Website: Heartstart Facebook Page

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Instagram: Heartstart Instagram Page