CPR-athon Gets Hearts Pumping!
On Wednesday 17th September 2025, four members of the Vale of Evesham Community First Responders drove up to the NEC in Birmingham to take part in a ‘CPR-athon’ at the Emergency Services Show. The idea was to demonstrate the use of correct CPR to members of the public and others attending the show, at the same time as raising funds for the Resuscitation Council UK, whose work underpins the guidelines, training and research that makes modern resuscitation possible.
L-R: Andy Rosser (WMAS), Antony Bunce (VoECFR), Johnathan Phillips (WMAS), Martin Goff-Jones (VoECFR), Richard Sumner (VoECFR)
CPR was carried out (on a training dummy!) during the entire time the show was open over two days, with teams of people taking turns to carry out two minutes of CPR each. Passers by were also encouraged to take part, many of them admitting they had never tried CPR before. Reflecting on the show James Devonshire from the Emergency Services Times later said “Having done my two minutes, I was surprised by just how hard you have to push to perform CPR properly - and by how much a chest cavity depresses during the process. It was a sobering reminder that this is both a vital and physically demanding skill”. This wasn’t just about keeping chest compressions going hour after hour, it was about showcasing how far we’ve come, and how we can keep pushing survival rates higher. Every minute without CPR and defibrillation reduces the chance of surviving a cardiac arrest by about 10%.
We need your help please. As a charity, we receive no funding from either the NHS or West Midlands Ambulance Service. We rely completely on your generosity through donations to help us keep responding to 999 emergencies in our local communities - especially to people suffering a cardiac arrest. Please can you help us with a donation? No matter how small - every penny counts. The next life we save could be yours! Please CLICK HERE to be taken to our donation page. We also now run our own lottery, please CLICK HERE to take part. Thank you.
