Halifax dad backing new drive to get more people trained in CPR
Neil Davidson's life was saved by his son - who'd learnt CPR at school
A Halifax dad whose life was saved by his son is backing a fresh drive to get more people across West Yorkshire trained in CPR.
The Resuscitation Council UK has teamed up with the GoodSAM app to encourage people to sign up as volunteer responders. Once they’re trained up, the app will send out an alert if somebody near them is in cardiac arrest.
Research shows 80 per cent of cardiac arrests happen outside of hospital – but just 51 per cent of adults in the UK would feel confident to perform CPR in that situation.
For Neil Davidson, 55, the importance of knowing what to do can’t be underestimated.
He was in bed at his home in Shelf in 2017 when he went into cardiac arrest at 3am.
His wife did not know CPR, but she alerted their 25-year-old son Oliver – who luckily was at home visiting from Australia where he lives. He was due to set off for the airport later that morning to return home.
Oliver had been taught CPR at school ten years earlier when he was just 15. He began working on his dad, and continued CPR for 21 minutes until paramedics arrived.
They then began using a defibrillator and managed to restart Neil’s heart on the fourth attempt. He was placed into a medically induced coma before being transported to hospital where he had open heart surgery.
“Quite simply I just call him my lifesaver,” Neil says.
“I am one of the single percentage of people who survive a cardiac arrest outside of hospital.
“If he hadn’t been here, I’d have died. My wife didn’t know what to do, she hadn’t been trained in CPR, and neither had I really. My son had.”
He’s since launched his own Community Foundation fund to help deliver more CPR training. He’s backing the idea of getting people signed up to the GoodSAM app as volunteer responders.
“Anything that encourages anybody to learn CPR and defib awareness is absolutely brilliant. More lives will be saved, there’s no doubt about it.”
Oliver has since gone on to change careers since saving his Dad's life - and has now retrained as a nurse working at the cardiology department at the hospital on Australia's Gold Coast.
Figures from Yorkshire Ambulance Service show that in 2021, just 7.7 per cent of people who had a cardiac arrest outside of hospital went on to survive for more than 30 days.
You can learn the basic steps to perform CPR on the British Heart Foundation website.