CLARA DUPRE
“The first time I understood that first aid training would be my hobby was in November 2019, the day after my 18th birthday. As a volunteer with the French Red Cross, I was on duty in a rescue center of the Paris Fire Brigade . After a relatively calm start to the shift, the alarm sounded: I left with a team for my first intervention for a cardiorespiratory arrest, for an 83-year-old woman. Despite our rapid arrival, and the first gestures as best she could by her granddaughter, with the help of the fire operator on the line, the person was declared dead after a long attempt at resuscitation.
What marks me that day, as every time it has happened since, is not so much the dull cry coming from the depths of the guts that loved ones utter when we tell them the news, but the silence that follows. And their face is transfigured when they finally understand… In this deafening silence, I promise myself to do everything in the future to act in cases where death can be avoided by rapid and effective first aid. When a person is in cardiac arrest, each minute that passes without treatment is equivalent to a 10% lower chance of survival. In Paris, help arrives on average in seven minutes.
This is why I am today, at 22 years old, a professional first aid trainer. My job is to teach life-saving gestures to adults, adolescents, future first aid professionals, young parents… how to do a cardiac massage in the event of a heart failure, but also how to react in the event of bad fall, burn, cut, etc. I also spend a good part of my free time, in real life and on social networks, raising awareness about first aid. And I continue, on the side, as volunteer guards for the Red Cross, a few times a month, where I supervise teams of rescuers.
It must be said that the subject of first aid, and life which can end in a few seconds, particularly speaks to me. As a child, I saw the impact that the death of a loved one could have on a family, with the loss of my little sister from complications of an illness. Then my youth was punctuated by various health problems and accidents, where I ended up in an ambulance several times. All this to say that I have the impression of “giving back” something to society today by embarking on this path. First aid has become a philosophy, a passion, almost an obsession. The contents of my library as those close to me can attest.
I never feel like I’m working!
I have completed numerous first aid diplomas and certifications over the past four years. Every week I read specialist journals and research articles on the subject, diseases, etc. I participate in a number of events. But I never feel like I’m working! I find there the stimulation and adrenaline that I missed in high school when, as a good student, I was bored and fell asleep in class. Enrolled in the scientific sector, classified in the mathematics Olympics, I imagine that the royal road “prep class-grande école” could have been for me. But this recurring boredom led me to stop my schooling in the summer of 2019, a year before my baccalaureate . First aid, which I had discovered a little earlier during a forum of associations in my district, then imposed itself on me.
Forty thousand people die each year in France from cardiac arrest. It drives me crazy all these lives that could be saved if more French people were trained in first aid. Only one in three today are able to intervene to help a person who has a cardiac arrest in front of them. I’m not talking about the unknown little granny who collapses while leaving the bakery with her baguette under her arm. No, the majority of cardiac arrests occur in front of a family member. The survival rate is 7% if no action is performed. It rises to almost 40% with a massage performed quickly.
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Faced with these figures that I know by heart, and that I repeat throughout training, I try to have an increasing impact, by changing roles: I was limited to my own interventions as a volunteer first aid worker, I am therefore became intervention leader, then trainer, then trainer of trainers. But this is not enough if we want to reduce as much as possible this feeling of extreme helplessness experienced by relatives of people who have had a cardiac arrest. We must use new awareness channels, those of young people in particular, because this awareness of life-saving actions must begin as early as possible.
This is why I landed on social networks for some time with the hashtag #Objectiftousformeés, which is also tattooed on my wrist as a constant reminder of this mission that I gave myself. On TikTok or Instagram, for example, I try, in one-minute videos, in a humorous tone and with the codes of young people, to give essential information on these small gestures, not necessarily complicated, which allow to help: how to put someone in a side safety position (PLS), how to make a tourniquet, recognize a stroke, react in the event of choking, etc. It allows me to reach thousands of people at the same time. And perhaps make them want to do more in-depth training.
In 2017, Emmanuel Macron committed to ensuring that 80% of the population would be trained in first aid before the end of his first five-year term. We are far from it. However, this could save as many as 20,000 lives each year. We must make first aid training more accessible to all, ensure that those at school, in theory compulsory, are actually carried out and reinforced, generalize the installation of defibrillators in public and private places, etc.
In the meantime, I try to act at my level. Soon, I would like Objectif tous formation to transform into a public utility association specializing in first aid awareness. I would also like to start studying medicine within two years: a new way to get involved and help others. »
