5 junior doctors from St Mary’s Hospital visited Cowes Enterprise College earlier this month to teach some students the basics of CPR and how to use a defibrillator.
The junior medics joined the many across England who were striking over the differences being made to their pay. There are 55,000 Junior Doctors in the country which accounts to a third of our current medical workforce. It has been proposed that whilst the pay rate for junior doctors will increase by 13.5% on average, work hours will also change meaning there will be no guaranteed pay increases for new medics. This has been designed partly to make it cheaper to pay staff to work on weekend and other unsociable hours.
As part of the strike, junior doctors David Bicknell, Sara Osman, Andrew Webborn, Michele DeFilippo and Tom Lloyd Jones attended the academy to teach students basic CPR and how to use a defibrillator in an emergency. It was a hugely successful day and students were really engaged and enthusiastic to learn more.
Junior doctor, David Bicknell, said:
“We wanted to do something positive to serve the community during the day.”
The students were organised into small groups of about 10 and taught by each of the medics how to perform mouth-to-mouth CPR and use compressions to keep a person alive. The groups used training manikins to practice on and each student had a chance to test out basic CPR.
Shortly after, Tom Lloyd Jones ran a brief but informative talk on how CPR and defibrillators come in useful when saving someone’s life. This was followed by a demonstration of the use of the defibrillator machine and a couple of students were lucky enough to test the machine out as well.
Andrew Webborn, who co-ordinated the event said:
“It was organised very last minute but we wanted to raise awareness of the situation by doing something positive with our time. Education is a massive factor within our field of work and being able to show young people when to use 111, 999, defibrillators and basic CPR is very important. Now we know that if these young people are in an emergency situation they are aware of what to do – we want to work with local schools as much as possible.”
Naomi Kullander, an academy First Aider who organised for medics to run these sessions said:
“Our students really enjoyed learning important life-saving skills and we are so grateful to the brilliant junior doctors for coming in whilst they were on strike.”
