LESS than half the population of Britain would know what to do first if faced with an unconscious person.

To improve this sad state of affairs, St John Ambulance is offering everyone the opportunity next week to learn how to save a life.

Its Breath of Life Campaign, involving free two-hour courses, is being offered throughout the UK from October 30 to November 5.

Here the Bolton Evening News examines the facts and explains how YOU can help . . . AN ELDERLY person who collapses at a family gathering here in the North-west is dicing with death

What would they get in the way of First Aid? Believe it or not, some people in the region would actually sit on the chest of their afflicted relative.

Maybe they were thinking in terms of an inheritance, but that is the startling fact revealed by a Gallup survey done on behalf of St John Ambulance.

In fact, LESS THAN HALF the population of Britain would know what to do first if faced with an unconscious person and that, say officials of Britain's premier First Aid training organisation, is "frightening."

The North-west displays the greatest lack of knowledge in the country with only ONE THIRD of those asked giving the correct procedure.

Even given a choice of five options of treatment for an elderly collapsed relative or a six-month-old child who had stopped breathing, people were still unsure.

In the case of the baby, there were even some who decided the best option for resuscitation would be to pour cod liver oil down the unfortunate infant's throat and rub its chest hard.

That is pretty bad.

To improve this sad state of affairs, St John Ambulance will be offering everyone the opportunity to learn how to save a life during its Breath of Life Campaign, with free two-hour courses being offered throughout the UK during the campaign week, October 30 to November 5.

Apparently only 25 per cent of the population have attended a First Aid course in the last six years and 48 per cent have never been on one.

The course on offer will teach people how to recognise when a person is suffering from a heart attack, when a person is unconscious and when a patient needs resuscitation. And they will be taught how to do it.

Each year brings 330,000 heart attack cases and, of these, 95,457 will die; one death every five minutes.

Many could survive with appropriate treatment.

During the first week-long campaign in 1993, St John Ambulance trained 85,000 people and know that, as a direct result, four lives were saved. Sadly, the only remarkable thing the survey revealed about the North-west was its apathy; only 11 per cent said they would be bothered to get First Aid training - yet almost half the people questioned either cared for an elderly or disabled relative or knew someone who did.

Fifty-eight per cent felt at least one member of each household should be First Aid trained and one in four people had been in a situation where they needed the knowledge. Yet only 28 per cent said they wished they knew how to give mouth to mouth resuscitation and only 23 per cent had had First Aid training in the last three years.

Only just over half felt that First Aid was a vital knowledge. And on them may depend the lives of the other half.

To book a Breath of Life course telephone 0839 901 999. (Calls cost 49p per minute at peak rate, 39p per minute at other times. The estimated length of the calls is two minutes).

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.