Accidents and emergencies happen anywhere and anytime. People can get injured at home or in the busy market. Same way someone can get a stroke or a heart attack at home or at work. Whenever any such event happens, the best outcome can be achieved if the care can be made available as soon as possible. We expect to bring those patients to hospital as soon as possible, so that the doctors and nurses stabilize them and treat them. In more developed countries, trained paramedics take patient to the hospital and enroute start stabilizing patients.
An ideal way could be to equip every person to identify any life-threatening situation and also be able to support the patient when there is no pulse and no breathing. This is by providing cardiopulmonary resuscitation or CPR. Each person of the society must learn to identify a life-threatening situation and learn to provide CPR. This way anyone who needs any CPR can be provided with that by any bystander, and valuable time will not be lost. This increases the likelihood of best care to the sick person, so that they can recover from the life-threatening situation.
Communities across Pakistan need to create this mindset of citizen providing CPR in case of needs. The community should raise awareness, mobilize the citizen to learn, practice, and utilize the skill of providing resuscitation in case of need. This requires mass level teaching of the individuals and providing them with competency to do CPR. Using tried strategies from the first world we need to institute CPR training at schools to begin with. The school provide the best opportunity as the young kids are energetic and eager to learn and they are more likely to practice it whenever there is a need to provide CPR.
There are plenty of organizations offering basic life support, including American Heart Association (AHA). They offer a comprehensive method of teaching and learning and improving the competency. Communities an develop their own CPR module and they can also develop some tailored course to fulfil the need to provide better care. This may include small interventions like bleeding control, and caring for the wound and small fractures, which are seen in any community. It becomes more important in countries where less resources make it difficult to have fully trained paramedics available all the time and for all the communities.
I am part of an initiative to train the local healthcare workers to develop the skills needed for the initial care of the patients in the communities. The health workers of Gilgit-Baltistan will be learning this competency, through classroom and hands on teaching. We will also conduct drills and try to work on developing soft skills of communication.
We like to create master trainers so that the new blood is getting these competencies locally and no one need to travel long distances to acquire life saving skills. These life saving skills are relatively easy to learn but require continuous practice.
I hope that people who make the decisions for the citizens understand the value of it and also understand that it is not resource intensive or expensive proposition, if done right.