Hospital da Luz Póvoa de Varzim, in collaboration with the Fundação Portuguesa de Cardiologia, offered automated external defibrillators (AED) to four schools in the region: Colégio de Amorim; Escola Secundária Eça de Queirós; Escola Secundária Rocha Peixoto; Colégio do Forte (em Vila do Conde). The delivery of the devices occurred last May 5 and the initiative falls within the scope of the program “20 years, 20 causes”, which celebrates the 20 years of existence of Luz Saúde, the group owning the Hospital da Luz network. Besides this equipment, hundreds of students and collaborators of those schools also received specific training in Basic Life Support (BLS) manoeuvres resorting to AED, that is being developed by teams of Hospital da Luz Póvoa de Varzim. Cardiorespiratory arrest is one of the main causes of death all over the world, and BLS manoeuvres and the resort to defibrillators increase substantially the chances of survival of the victims, when initiated in the first few minutes after the cardiac arrest. As recently reported by INEM, only 200 of the over 5,000 educational establishments in Portugal are equipped with AED devices. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Luz Saúde chose over 20 associations of different kinds of social intervention, with which it carried out, between 2020 and 2022, several initiatives of solidarity and community involvement. The Fundação Portuguesa de Cardiologia (FPC) emerged naturally among the institutions selected by Luz Saúde to be supported in the scope of its program “20 years, 20 causes”. Hospital da Luz Póvoa de Varzim, on its turn, was the winner of an internal challenge launched to the units of the group, in order to select the one to offer schools of the region the basic means to help saving lives, namely AED devices, certified courses in BLS (provided by FPC) and training to students. Hospital da Luz Póvoa de Varzim, which develops regularly different initiatives near the community to enhance access to healthcare, embraced with great enthusiasm this new cause – named “For a safer school – Together we will save lives”. The training that is being provided and the AED devices represent a decisive advantage for these four schools: that are, from now on, equipped to deal with situations of cardiorespiratory arrest, with the appropriate equipment and human technical knowledge.
