Gonzalo is eleven years old and is playing during snack time with his friends. He sees one of them suddenly stop playing and put his hands on his neck, but, far from panicking, he approaches him, performs the Heimlich maneuver carefully, and his partner expels the piece of sandwich from his mouth. Mateo is four years old and sees that his mother is not waking up. She could be asleep, but she should have taken him to school and she didn’t. If mom doesn’t wake up when you shake her, something strange is happening. He remembers what he was taught: he has one mouth, one nose and two eyes, 1-1-2. Mark and call. Sofía, nine years old, calls the emergency room because something is wrong with her grandfather: his chest hurts a lot. He remembers to leave his cell phone open. While the ambulance arrives, he tries to give her a cardiac massage. Most of the names of these boys and girls are not real, but what they did is. The first case, that of Gonzalo, It happened just a few days ago in Leóna feat for which his class gave him a diploma that read: “Hero. On October 9, 2024, he saved the life of a colleague.”
“I started crying when they told me. It is one of the many joys I have had,” says Ignacio Manrique about the case of Sofía, who had participated in one of the children’s workshops that he organizes as president of the Spanish Pediatric Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Group and director of the Valencian Institute of Pediatrics.
These types of workshops, in which professionals teach boys and girls how to respond to emergencies that may arise on a daily basis, have not stopped growing in the last decade. One of the turning points that explains this phenomenon, says Marta Nonide, one of the guilty of its popularization, it is simple: more and more children are alone at home. “Until a few years ago it was the pack – the family – that took care of: there was always a housewife in the home, the grandparents were much closer and there were fewer only children,” he analyzes.
Nonide is a doctor at the SAMU of Asturias and directs the project “CPR from my school”: an idea that started in 2014 and that has served as inspiration for many countries around the world. In places like Argentina, Uruguay or Chile they are replicating their workshops. One of its best-known resources, the resuscitation songhas been translated into Guaraní, French, English… “It’s all over the world,” she explains proudly.
Small, but not that small
“You start to ask: How many of you are left alone with an elder? Only with a father, a mother, a grandfather, a brother or a teacher. What if the teacher faints? Is the class still playing football? Or do you immediately realize that something strange is happening here and run for help? From the age of eight this is obvious, but below the age of eight if they do not practice it, they do not know it. If you practice it, they are little ‘soldiers’ who obey and act and respond much better than any adult. They don’t have the doubts of an adult: they have been told that they have to do this and they do it. It’s like when you tell them ‘you have to go holding hands in line’, because that’s what they do,” says the Asturian doctor.
“People say: ‘they’re too small.’ Yes, they are very small, but I can teach a three-year-old child, with gestures, to call 112. We also teach them how to put a person in the safety side position, which is a life-saving position. We ask them to bring their favorite stuffed animals to school and the children like it because they feel like they are saving ‘their little stuffed animal’. Then, older children, up to five years old, can learn the direction in which they are or what they have to do. call 112 or to a neighbor if CPR has to be done,” explains Laura Ruiz, nurse and director of the company Salvando Vidas, which teaches first aid courses.
Saving lives from the age of three
“A three-year-old child with, for example, an epileptic or diabetic parent, can perfectly learn, mechanize… Call the neighbor or talk to an Alexa-type virtual assistant to help them. And from four onwards, practically whatever you want”, such as maneuvers to clear the airway or how to save an adult if they choke. After the age of eight they already practice everything else in pairs and change the stuffed animals for junior mannequins.
Until the age of 14, more or less, they will not be able to perform effective cardiopulmonary resuscitation on an adult, since they do not have sufficient strength and maturity. However, they explain, by the time the time comes in youth or adulthood they will know how to perform the maneuver perfectly.
We encountered many situations in which, if we had been warned earlier, these people could have been saved: strokes or children who had been with their dead grandfather for 12 hours.
Marta Nonide
— Creator of the RCP project from my school
However, despite this budding popularity, these workshops are not standardized across the country. The Royal Decree of February 28, 2014 which establishes the basic curriculum of Primary Education, urges schools to include first aid teaching in the basic curriculum of Primary Educationbut this does not usually happen. In recent years, illustrated books such as Nurse bear and first aid (self-published in 2021 by Marta Almansa Esteva, pediatric nurse) or Oh! A book about the body, wounds, and how we heal (Takatuka), released this last month.
The history of the RCP project from my school
It all started with a “cluster of coincidences.” Marta Nonide worked at the mobile ICU in Gijón and often arrived at places where the first witness to the emergency was a child. “We encountered many situations in which, if we had been warned earlier, those people could have been saved. A stroke, a low blood sugar, a blow to the head, or children who had been with their dead grandfather for 12 hours. And, with that, the drama, the cries, the screams, the child, who didn’t understand anything…”, he says.
That was combined with a call that came in 2012 from an eight-year-old girl: “my grandmother has fainted and my parents told me that if this happened to call 112 and to do everything they told me and to answer everything.” that they would ask me,” said the creature. It turned out to be a stroke. They asked her the pertinent questions to verify it and, as she was alone with her six-year-old sister, Nonide asked her if by giving her instructions she could put her ‘grandmother’ aside. Thus, the two sisters managed to put her in a safe lateral position and in 15 minutes help was there.
60% of Spaniards do not feel qualified to respond to this type of emergency and 54% admitted to having never received a first aid course.
Her children were three and four years old at the time and she began to wonder: “What if something happens to me while I’m alone with them? Or his father?” He then began to give workshops. One day he uploaded a video to social media, and the Internet exploded. The next day it had three million views and for three days “it was an absolute bombardment.” It was the first time, he says, that so many people saw five-year-old children talking about resuscitation and taking an adult to the side in an emergency. Now there are projects like this throughout the entire Spanish territory.
A way to solve the low rate of CPR maneuvers
The specialists consulted assure that giving these workshops in childhood is the way to solve the low percentage that we have in Spain of people who know how to do CPR. According to a study carried out by the MAPFRE Foundation and the Spanish Society of Emergency Medicine (SEMES), 60% of Spaniards do not feel qualified to respond to this type of emergency and 54% admitted to having never received a first aid course. The rate of performing CPR maneuvers in Spain, according to a study by EuReCa TWO, a project of the European Resurrection Council (ERC), is below 15%.
In contrast, in the Nordic countries, where CPR training is integrated into the educational system and it is more common for regular courses to be offered to the population from an early age, a large majority claim to know how to perform CPR and also put it into practice. in emergency situations. In countries such as Norway, Denmark or Sweden, it is estimated that between 70 and 80% of the population has received CPR training.
Nonide assures that we do not have to wait for adolescence to impart this knowledge, since with it comes shame and phrases like “I’m a boy, I don’t encourage girls.” “There you lose many. This doesn’t happen with children. In childhood they mechanize all techniques to perfection. When they are teenagers and have to help someone, they will do it perfectly and without hesitation.” One hour a year is enough, he says. “If at school they give one hour at five years old, they recycle at six, seven, eight… Until they are sixteen, that’s it. You have to put this on your resume. You can put it in Physical Education, in Naturals, in Values…”.
Ignacio Manrique, as president of the Spanish Pediatric Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Group, supports this and underlines the importance of these workshops beginning to be regulated, that they pass a series of controls, or that they request accreditation from organizations like his. These last five years there has been a boom of this type of workshops, and he assures, “it will continue to grow, and it will be unstoppable.”
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