Irish Heart Foundation recognised by the American Heart Association
The Irish Heart Foundation has received a prestigious Award of Merit from the American Heart Association (AHA) for its highly successful CPR 4 Schools programme.
Central to the mission of the Irish Heart Foundation is to help save more lives from cardiac arrest through its CPR training programmes, one of these is the CPR for Schools programme.
Established in 2016, the Irish Heart Foundation’s CPR 4 Schools programme provides post primary school teachers with free training, kits, and resources to deliver the programme via an online portal of training videos and step by step lesson plans.
The ambition is to offer free CPR training to every post primary school student (typically aged 12 to 18) in Ireland.
To ensure the schools’ programme was sustainable, the Irish Heart Foundation designed a ‘train the trainer’ model. This model provides training to teachers to teach CPR to their students and it has the potential to reach 365,000 teenagers in post primary schools across Ireland.
“We are honoured to receive an award of merit for CPR 4 Schools from the American Heart Association."
Laura Hickey, Children and Young People Programme Manager, The Irish Heart Foundation
The programme began as a pilot in September 2016 and the feedback was hugely positive. The success of the pilot allowed the Irish Heart Foundation to launch a national programme in September 2017 with support from the Bank of Ireland.
Currently, the CPR 4 Schools program has been implemented in 309 schools in Ireland, about 43 per cent of the secondary schools in the country. Thirty-six percent of schools have trained every single student in their school.
Stemming from the AHA Family and Friends® course, in the coming academic year the Irish Heart Foundation’s CPR 4 Schools will provide training to another 200 post primary schools and more than 400 teachers in Ireland.
In its citation for the award the AHA said, “For thinking innovatively about new ways to save more lives from cardiac arrest we celebrate the Irish Heart Foundation in Dublin, Ireland with the Award of Merit.”
Commenting on the award Laura Hickey Children and Young People Programme Manager at the Irish Heart Foundation said, “We are honoured to receive an award of merit for CPR 4 Schools from the American Heart Association. In just two short years we are already seeing evidence of teenagers and teachers having to use the skills we have taught in the CPR 4 Schools programme. We would like to thank all the schools across Ireland who’ve embraced this programme, together we will create the next generation of lifesavers. We look forward to working with an additional 200 more schools this year”
