Every year in Italy around 65 thousand people die due to lack or delays in first aid. From suffocation alone, 500 children die in Europe every year. In Italy we are talking about 1 child every 10 days, with 1000 annual hospitalizations linked to these accidents. A huge and worrying number and yet in our country, excluding healthcare personnel, less than 1% of the population knows how to free a child’s airways from a foreign body (in the United States over 57%).
Since 2015, Lions Italia (Multidistrict 108 Italy) has been working to try to fill this “training” gap through “Viva Sofia: two hands for life”, the national service created to provide life-saving knowledge and procedures while waiting for 112/118 personnel , such as basic unblocking and resuscitation maneuvers, as well as elements of first aid and the use of a defibrillator.
Thanks to the activity of Lions volunteers – doctors, nurses, trained healthcare personnel – over 40 thousand people have been trained in recent years: school teachers and kitchen staff, high school and university students, in some cases even elementary school children , parents and workers. The Service is carried out in the most diverse places – schools, beaches, theatres, university classrooms – to try to reach an increasingly wider audience, since these simple first aid rules can really save a life.
Birth of the Service. We are in 2015: Sofia is a 6-year-old girl from Faenza who was choking on a shrimp. She is saved thanks to the prompt intervention of her nurse mother, with the maneuver to unblock the airways. The head doctor of the Faenza hospital, Daniele Donigaglia, who visited the little girl, was deeply impressed by the fact and decided to propose this “service” as of national interest at the 2016 Sanremo conference.
Numbers. As regards accidents related to airway obstruction, these mostly occur in children aged between 2 months and 2 years, due to food (67.4%) or ingested toys (20% of cases) . The age most at risk is between 0 and 3 years, due to inability to chew, still inefficient swallowing, inexperience in choking and deciduous dentition.
In all these cases, immediate intervention is fundamental: brain damage begins 4 minutes after suffocation, and brain death occurs after 10 minutes. Every minute that passes, survival is reduced by 10-12%. Statistically, with the 112 intervention alone, in the absence of any first aid maneuver, survival reached a maximum of 15%.
Lions training. Through the Service, the Lions volunteers, in addition to providing some basic information to try to prevent these accidents (such as making children always eat while sitting at the table, avoiding chewing gum and inflatable latex balloons, chopping up food) through the aid of special mannequins and other instruments teach the main maneuvers in case of total obstruction in infants, children, adults (such as the well-known Heimlich maneuver, cardiac massage and “mouth-to-mouth” breathing and in the most serious cases the use of the defibrillator) . Anyone wishing to organize one of these courses at “their” school, company, organization, simply make a request to the Lions Club of their district and the course will be organized free of charge for them by the volunteers
Claudio Sabattini, president of the Lions Council of Governors: “Less than 1% of the population knows first aid procedures. It is an impressive figure and it is in the shadow of these numbers that tragedies of broken lives and devastated families arise. Lions Italy have responded to this challenge with the ‘Viva Sofia: two hands for life’ programme, which has already trained over 40 thousand people since 2015 and we aim to train over 6 thousand this year. Through practical and informative lessons in the most diverse facilities, we teach first aid maneuvers, such as the Heimlich maneuver and cardiac massage, to deal with emergency situations, bringing knowledge and preparation to as many people as possible.”
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