Published 12 June 2018

The UK’s leading water safety charity, the Royal Life Saving Society (RLSS UK), is calling for all first aiders to use their skills to support ambulance services in emergencies and save lives.                            

The charity has partnered with GoodSAM (Good Smartphone Activated Medics), a community of more than 40,000 verified first aid trained volunteers who have registered as responders with the totally free, GoodSAM Responder app.

To mark the launch of their new partnership and to grow the GoodSAM community even further, RLSS UK wants 999 first aiders to sign up to the GoodSAM Responder app by 9 July 2018.

As the world’s most advanced emergency alerting and dispatching platform, the app notifies nearby qualified responders of a medical emergency where a cardiac arrest is likely allowing them to provide potentially life-saving aid, if they chose, before the arrival of emergency services.

When a person suffers cardiac arrest, seconds count. It’s critical that casualties receive CPR and defibrillation in the first three to four minutes.

“The GoodSAM app was created with a community of lifesavers in mind; a flexible collaboration of people, skills and resources with the capacity to access and aid people during a cardiac arrest or life threatening emergency, in the shortest space of time. GoodSAM can save lives by getting a trained first aider to the patient ahead of Ambulance Service arrival, wherever you are in the world,” says Professor Mark Wilson, Medical Director and Co-Founder of GoodSAM.

If you’ve been trained by the Royal Life Saving Society, simply download the free GoodSAM Responder app, register and select us as your Verifying Organisation. “There are a huge number of people in water sports with emergency first aid skills who could become GoodSAM responders. The app is free to download, so it couldn’t be easier to join this community of volunteers and help save lives by performing basic first aid in the minutes before the medical response arrives,” says Keith Osborne, IQL UK National Account Manager, who has already registered as a GoodSAM responder.

The GoodSAM app, which hosts the world’s largest defibrillator registry, has a new mobile defibrillator tracking system that maps the thousands of defibrillators that are moving, for example in police vehicles. The new feature maps these so that they can also be located by a responder on route to an emergency to increase the chance of saving the life of someone who is in cardiac arrest.

The system enables those registered as a GoodSAM Responder to indicate when they have a defibrillator with them. When a GoodSAM Responder is alerted to, and accepts a call to, help save someone, they will see where their nearest defibrillators are, whether they are in a car, taxi or in a fixed location.

Further information on GoodSAM can be found at: goodsamapp.org