A St John Ambulance trainer put her skills into action when she saved the life of a man who had collapsed with a cardiac arrest during her lunch break.
Katrina Carolan, 42, from Forest Hill, was alerted to the emergency last Tuesday by students returning to her cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) course after lunch.
She rushed outside and found the elderly man on the pavement outside Leytonstone Tube station.
Ms Carolan took over from an off-duty nurse who was giving the man chest compressions. She said: “The nurse said she’d never done CPR with rescue breaths so I took over. I told my students to go back to the classroom as I didn’t want them seeing something like that before they’d even learned CPR.”
She continued doing rescue breaths and chest compressions while St John volunteers David and Linda Root administered artificial respiration with a ventilator. Two motorcycle paramedics, an ambulance and a fast response car were also at the scene in minutes.
The patient started breathing again after paramedics delivered four shocks to his heart with a defibrillator.
When Ms Carolan went back to the classroom paramedics told her that her actions had saved the man’s life.
“At that point my students started applauding and hugging me,” she said. “I felt really chuffed and I told them: ‘You see, this proves first aid works’.”
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