100 Bayelsa students, teachers trained in emergency response

FIRST Exploration & Petroleum Development Company Limited and the NNPC Limited/FIRST E&P Joint Venture, in partnership with the Health Emergency Initiative, have trained over 100 secondary school students and teachers from public schools in Bayelsa State in first aid, cardiopulmonary resuscitation and other emergency response skills.

The two-day training in Yenagoa was designed to equip the participants with basic skills to provide immediate assistance during emergencies before professional medical help arrives.

The Executive Director and founder of HEI, Paschal Achunine, said the initiative was aimed at changing the attitude of bystanders from recording emergencies on social media to taking proactive steps to save lives.

“Our expectation is that as opposed to the current practice, where people take pictures and videos and put on social media when an emergency happens, we’ll see more proactive response, a robust response from young people,” he said.

The HEI founder said the participants were trained in basic first aid, CPR and other pre-hospital skills, adding that the intervention could improve the survival chances of accident victims and people suffering cardiovascular emergencies.

He said, “We’ve seen a lot of high-profile people, young persons, adults, who slumped: Some were in their offices, some were on the road, and people around were pouring water on them, doing nothing positive to save or to offer them CPR. So this is to change that story.”

Achunine noted that road crashes were responsible for a significant number of deaths among young people, stressing that equipping students with emergency-response skills could help reduce preventable deaths.

He also disclosed that more than 30 per cent of deaths in Nigeria occurred during the pre-hospital stage, describing the initiative as a proactive effort to address the challenge.

According to him, HEI has operated a post-crash care programme since 2017 through partnerships with organisations including the Federal Road Safety Corps and hospitals, providing up to N100,000 deposit support for critically injured crash victims taken to hospitals.

He said the first responders’ training was designed to complement the intervention by ensuring that appropriate lifesaving action was taken before victims reached hospitals.

Achunine said approval had been obtained from the relevant authorities to introduce the programme into composite subjects in primary and secondary schools.

“In the coming months, in the new academic year, we’ll start seeing emergency health education, which is a more robust version of this training conducted with practical applications in secondary and primary schools,” he said.

Also speaking, the Executive Director, Corporate Services, FIRST E&P, Emmanuel Etomi, said the company supported the initiative because timely intervention during emergencies could determine whether a victim survived.

Etomi said, “During a medical emergency, road accident, cardiac arrest, or other life-threatening incident, the difference between life and death can be measured in minutes.”

He said there was a need to ensure that people within communities knew what to do before professional help arrived, adding that the students and teachers could become the first point of assistance during emergencies in schools, homes and communities.

Etomi disclosed that HEI was among the five inaugural beneficiaries of Impact FIRST: Heritage, a multi-year funding programme launched by the NNPC Limited/FIRST E&P Joint Venture to support organisations with proven impact and sustainable delivery models.