When Danish international Christian Eriksen collapsed on the field of play during the Euros, his fellow players and medics knew exactly how to react.
The player’s life was saved by a defibrillator which jolted his heart back to life. All his team-mates would have known the procedure because in Denmark, as in several other European countries, life saving training is pretty much compulsory.
In heart attack situations every minute counts and the two minutes spinning in panic, not know what to do, is possibly a life lost.
In rural areas of Scotland, with hospitals and ambulances far away, help is not close to hand.
That’s why Skye man Ross Cowie has spent the last decade campaigning to have life-saving defibrillators installed all across Scotland.
Nearly 1000 have been distributed, fund-raised by local communities with back-up training provided. Lives have been saved as a result.
But the harsh fact is that your chances of surviving a heart attack in Scotland are one in 20, while in Denmark, where schoolchildren learn how to life-save, the odds are reduced to one in four.
That’s why Cowie is urging the Government to deliver life-saving training into every school in Scotland.
Learning how to save a life is, he says, the best two-and-half hours of schooling you can get.
The simple test is that if someone collapsed in front of us today, how many of us would know how to react and what to do to save a life?
The answer right now, is not enough of us, and that is good enough reason to get everyone trained.
