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Tom’s Guide
Tom’s Guide
Technology
Peter Wolinski

YouTube just got a new feature that could save lives in an emergency — how it works

A comp image with a photo of the YouTube app open on a smartphone, next to an image of someone performing CPR.

Have you ever wondered whether you'd know the right thing to do in an emergency? What if you need to perform CPR, or the Heimlich maneuver?

Obviously, getting yourself some proper first aid training is the best thing you can do, but if you haven't got round to doing so yet, YouTube has now started pinning medical emergency tutorials at the top of search results to give quick-fire demonstrations for aiding common emergency health situations.

From our testing, we found pinned medical demonstrations for the following emergencies: CPR, heart attack, stroke, seizures, overdose, drowning, broken limbs, bleeding, burns and choking.

Here's a quick run through of how it works, so you're prepared should the worst happen.

How to find medical demonstrations quickly on YouTube

The following steps were performed using the YouTube iOS app on an iPhone 15 Pro, but the process should be the same wherever you're using YouTube.

1. Open YouTube and search for a medical key term

First up, search for a key term related to the emergency you're facing.

As we mentioned above, we found results for the following terms (although this is not an exhaustive list):

  • CPR 
  • Heart attack 
  • Stroke
  • Seizures
  • Overdose
  • Drowning
  • Broken limbs
  • Bleeding 
  • Burns 
  • Choking (or Heimlich/Heimlich manuevre)

2. Find the 'From health sources' section

Now find the 'From health sources' section and view a quick fire tutorial video. This might not be at the top, but should be pinned very near the top. While there may be other videos showing how to deal with the emergency you've experiencing, this section contains very short videos intended to get to the nub of the issue as quickly as possible.


If you'd like more help with using YouTube, check out our other tutorials. We can show you how to download videos from YouTube, how to set up parental controls on YouTube and how to play games on YouTube if you have YouTube Premium.

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