Saving lives – the three Cs is an award winner

South Central Ambulance Service (SCAS) has won a Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) award for its campaign to increase public awareness of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and defibrillators.

Saving lives – the three Cs was named best healthcare campaign at the CIPR PRide Awards 2022 in the Anglia, Thames and Chiltern region.

Alongside raising public awareness and interest in CPR and automated external defibrillators (AED), the campaign set out to improve take-up rates of CPR and AED usage and raise funds for South Central Ambulance Charity to aid development of volunteers and the purchasing of equipment.

The campaign was developed by the communications department in collaboration with the community engagement and training team and South Central Ambulance Charity. The aim was to ensure regular communication throughout the year to secure national media coverage, significant social media engagement, charity donations and, most crucially, to aid an increase in out of hospital cardiac arrest survival rates.

The project covered four main subject areas including SCAS becoming the first in the country to roll out LUCAS 3, a device which can perform CPR on a patient automatically to free up paramedics to carry out other vital interventions. 

There were 2,294 occasions during the year where CPR was in progress prior to the arrival of an ambulance across Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Hampshire which supports SCAS’s improving out of hospital cardiac arrest survival rate of 13.9 per cent – one of the highest in the country.

“The dedication and the commitment from our communications department, charity and community training and engagement team in working together to raise the profile of CPR and defibrillators, funding advances in equipment and care and training members of the public has been vital in helping to improve out of hospital cardiac arrest survival rates in the SCAS region,” said Nicola Dunbar, head of community engagement and training at SCAS.

Gillian Hodgetts, director of communications, marketing and engagement at SCAS added, “We are all thrilled to win this prestigious award and more importantly for an aspect of our work that we are passionate about and that has the potential to help save many lives.”