ACT Foundation paving the way for defibrillator education in Canadian schools

OTTAWA, ON, 27/04/07

The Advanced Coronary Treatment (ACT) Foundation of Canada is paving the way for defibrillator education in Canadian schools through its pilot project in Ottawa.

ACT recently launched the ACT High School Defibrillator Pilot Project – the first of its kind in Canada – when nearly 20 teachers from four Ottawa high schools were trained to teach their students how to save lives with a defibrillator.

The goal of the pilot is to expand students’ CPR training, increasing their ability to respond to cardiac emergencies in public places. Research shows that when early citizen CPR is combined with early defibrillation, the rate of survival for a person experiencing a cardiac arrest almost doubles. “Easy-to-use defibrillators are appearing in many public places,” says Dr. Justin Maloney, an emergency physician and Medical Director for the ACT Foundation. “The schools teach young people to act, to start CPR. Now we want them to grab the defibrillator on the wall and use that too … schools teaching life skills that save lives.”

This project builds on the ACT High School CPR Program, which ACT is expanding across Canada. Over 900,000 youth from over 900 schools have been trained. “The defibrillator pilot will now provide us with a model for adding defibrillator training to the CPR program we’ve already set up in schools across Canada,” says ACT Foundation Executive Director Sandra Clarke.

About the ACT Foundation
The ACT Foundation is an award-winning, national charitable organization dedicated to promoting health and empowering Canadians to save lives. ACT is driving a national campaign to establish CPR as a mandatory program in every Canadian high school. Core partners are companies in the research-based pharmaceutical industry: AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb Canada, Pfizer Canada and sanofi-aventis. For more information visit: www.actfoundation.ca.