"Be the First to Respond in First Aid" Project Achieves a Significant Success

First Aid, You Run First Project Wins Major Award The "First Aid, You Run First" project, implemented through collaboration between the Turkish Emergency Medicine Association (TATD), Tüvana Reading-Eager Children Education Foundation (TOÇEV) and AstraZeneca Turkey, has achieved a major success at the Stevie International Business Awards. Under the project scope, volunteer emergency medicine specialists from TATD provide basic first aid training to high school students across various provinces in Turkey. These trainings include basic life support, chest compressions and artificial respiration in adults and children, as well as practical instruction on the Heimlich maneuver and airway obstruction due to foreign objects using mannequins. TOÇEV ensures coordination with schools to which training will be provided based on an announcement from the Ministry of National Education, covering schools in various provinces through Provincial Education Directorates. Pre- and post-training tests are also administered to measure the knowledge of participating students. To date, the project has reached more than 30,000 students at 85 schools in 11 provinces. Fifty-seven employees from AstraZeneca volunteered to support trainings held in different provinces. The project aims to provide training to 55,000 students at 155 schools in approximately 27 provinces by 2025. Trainings under the project will continue in new provinces during the next academic year.

TATD Board Chairman Prof. Dr. Serkan Yılmaz made the following comments on the matter:

"As TATD, we continue to work in coordination with local emergency medical systems within the scope of public education programs on basic life support applications and automatic defibrillator access in out-of-hospital settings. In communities where these basic applications are performed, we see striking improvements in survival rates due to sudden cardiac arrest." Yılmaz, noting that cardiac arrest is a leading cause of death for millions of people worldwide each year, continued as follows: "In such cases, survival chances increase with basic life support applied by first responders. Of deaths caused by sudden cardiac arrest, 2 out of every 3 occur before the person reaches the hospital. More than 95 percent of these deaths occur because there is currently no rescuer and rescue medical equipment available. When sudden cardiac arrest occurs, every minute that passes before the heart returns to normal rhythm reduces survival chances by 10 percent. If AED and CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) are applied within the first 4 minutes, survival chances are around 60 percent."  

TOÇEV Board Chairman Ebru Uygun emphasized the importance of corporate social responsibility for societal development and made the following assessments:

"As TOÇEV, we are working to promote awareness that corporate social responsibility is not a duty but a responsibility in our societal development and progress, and in enabling us to live more humanely. We are striving to ensure that social responsibility finds sufficient support in society. Through our First Aid, You Run First project, we respond to demands from schools and students and draw attention to the importance of being able to save lives with small gestures in accidents that could happen to anyone in daily life. The measurements we conducted with our project demonstrate its value once again; the contribution of AstraZeneca Turkey volunteer employees to the project makes this value even greater. With this award we received, we have crowned our project. In continuing our project, we will pursue our work to spread this training to a wider audience by visiting different provinces. We extend our sincere thanks to our stakeholders in this project, TATD and AstraZeneca Turkey."   AstraZeneca Turkey Country Head Pharm. Serkan Barış stated: "Since we began operating in Turkey, we have considered support for public health improvement as among our corporate responsibilities and priorities. This project, which we are implementing within the scope of the Young Health Program that AstraZeneca is currently running in 39 countries including Turkey, is one of our valuable projects in the field of access to healthcare services. We are deeply pleased that this meaningful project, which instills the importance of equipping the youth who are our future's guarantee with basic life support training, has had its contribution to our commitment to building a healthy future recognized at such an important awards organization. I extend my sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to this success." Source