HEALTH leaders in Denmark have urged Glasgow to become the first “visionary” city council in the UK to make CPR training compulsory in all its secondary schools.

Figures show the number of people surviving cardiac arrests tripled in Denmark after the country introduced the life-saving skill as a mandatory part of the curriculum.

An increase in bystander CPR, including school training, has been credited as the critical factor that has helped ensure one in four people now survive cardiac arrests. In Scotland, that figure is just one in 20.

The Evening Times has launched a campaign calling on Glasgow City Council to become the first local authority to introduce compulsory CPR training in all its secondary schools.

British Heart Foundation Scotland has pledged to equip all 30 schools with a £1300 training kit, which involves no teacher training and takes less than an hour to complete.

While some schools in the city are already incorporating CPR training into the school curriculum, the charity say mandatory training is the only way to ensure all pupils leave school with the life-saving skill.

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In Denmark, around 80% of people who suffer a cardiac arrest will receive bystander CPR. The life-saving skill has been compulsory in the country’s schools since 2005 and it is also compulsory for anyone learning to drive.

Dr Freddy Lippert, CEO of Emergency Medical Services, in Copenhagen, says there were initially ‘a lot of concerns’ from work-pressured teachers about the policy but it is now universally supported.

He said: “They thought they did not have time for this and that it was more complicated than it really is.

“Finding one hour in the annual curriculum should not and is not a problem. This is all about planning and prioritising.

“We had a goal for increasing bystander CPR by 50% and we had different initiatives going on but it was trial and error.

“We had more public defibrillators but they were not used. Then we encouraged people to do CPR when they called the emergency services.

“The National Danish Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Registry has documented tripling of survival and has illustrated the important impact of bystander CPR.

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“Teaching children CPR is all about a willingness to help your fellow citizens, learning a simple, practical skill.

“We saw that the pupils went back to their brothers and sisters and they learned it and the parents too.

“The politicians didn’t want to make it mandatory. But as it turned out, the public were much more engaged that they expected and then the politicians saw, this might be a good case to promote.

"It ended up being the population that lead this and the politicians followed and made the legislation.”

British Heart Foundation Scotland say the ideal time to teach pupils in Glasgow would be S4 because it is the last year where school is mandatory so is likely to ensure the majority are trained and suggest it could slot into personal and social education classes.

Dr Lippert believes the rest of Scotland, if not the UK, would follow Glasgow’s lead if the council took action.

He said: “Glasgow will get a lot of publicity for being the first city to do this.

“There are various ways to get CPR in schools.One is by legislation – that is the difficult path – because it is a long journey.

“The other way is to start with local schools, committed teachers or a visionary city council and even a visionary Scottish parliament that may want to lead as part of the Scottish Strategy.

"Introducing CPR training in school is very much about changing the mindset in the community, changing the expectations and culture of helping you fellow citizens.”

“What we can see is that the Danes were initially afraid to do something, they were afraid of getting it wrong and not confident they could do it.

“Now it is, 'of course we should help’ and we can see that 80% of people get help before the arrival of the ambulance. You cannot do anything wrong, the patient is already technically dead."

“Of survivors employed before arrest, 76.6% returned to work.

“So not only did the number of survivors increase during the years but also the percentage of favourable neurological outcomes improved.

“Scotland already has a very good strategy for improving the rate of bystander CPR. It would be so great if Glasgow did this, then Scotland followed and then the rest of the UK."