Editorial: All of us need to learn CPR

This week, we ran a story about a young man who saved his father's life through cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

CPR, as we all know it, is a system of evenly-spaced chest compressions which can restart the heart after a cardiac arrest. Logan Charters-Leahy started treating his father with a precordial thump - a hard thump on the chest - then launched into the CPR he learnt at school but perfected in his years as a junior firefighter.

Logan broke his father's ribs in the process, but saved his life.

The scenario of Mr Leahy's heart attack would be terrifying. His wife woke to find him on the floor, convulsing, tongue swollen and hands curled. St John says the survival rate for cardiac arrest is around 10 per cent, and CPR can significantly increase someone's chances of survival.

CPR, or systems which rely on the same principles, has been around since the 19th century.

Research shows a third of people who have a cardiac arrest outside of hospital receive CPR from a family member or bystander. A 1995 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed only around half of bystander-CPR was performed correctly.

But what do you do when you are faced with that situation. Do you give it a nudge?

Robert Leahy's heart stopped beating on Anzac Day.

Exactly a year earlier, my dad also had a heart attack.

Thankfully, he didn't require CPR because I doubt I would have remembered anything from the child CPR course I took when my daughter was a baby - and even if I could, that fuzzy, sparse and non-transferable knowledge could have possibly done more harm than good.

I accept the success rates for saving people with CPR are fairly low, but I wonder if - given this is life-saving knowledge - we should be doing more to ensure every man, woman and child knows the basics.

Many of us have been on a St John's first aid course at some point, but as Logan told the Bay of Plenty Times it was the repeated learning he received through the fire service that embedded the knowledge in his memory. One course may not be enough.