On Nov. 21 St. John Ambulance (partnered with Global Spectrum) will be hosting its annual CPR day at the Penticton Trade and Convention Centre. The free training program, open to anyone 12 years and older who cares to call 250-492-3377 and register, is just one of hundreds CPR St. John Ambulance puts on every year across B.C. and throughout the country.

This year alone St. John Ambulance will have trained over 91,000 students in CPR and its life-saving Samaritan cousin, first aid. And without question they, along with their 1,900 volunteers, should be commended for providing such a valuable service — as should all other organizations providing similar programs.

But why stop there? Performing effective CPR or first aid not only saves lives, the techniques also mitigate damage suffered by the victims, often avoiding years of anguish while saving money for both the medical system and society in general.

There are roughly 4.4 million people in this province. As long as you are cognitively and physically capable, every one of us ought to have at least a bare minimum amount of CPR and first aid training.

But where could we possibly find a place where citizens are systematically institutionalized on mass long enough to force them to learn government-mandated information and techniques whether they feel like it or not?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the high school.

Consider all the marginally usable things you were forced to memorize in high school before you could graduate: historical dates, volcano parts, sewing techniques, the periodic table (talk about wasting resources: it’s a chart which was created for the purpose of providing us information at a glance so we don’t have to commit it to memory), and the list goes on.

Some of it you used, and all of it someone used, but the vast majority of it you probably did not need to memorize.

According to the Heart and Stroke Foundation, “Once the heart stops pumping, seconds count. For every minute that passes without help, a person’s chance of surviving drops by about 10 per cent. But if you know how to respond to a cardiac arrest, their odds of survival and recovery may increase by 30 per cent or more.”

Effective CPR enables enough oxygen to reach the brain to delay brain damage or death, and allows the heart to remain responsive to defibrillation attempts once paramedics arrive.

Even if your day-to-day job now requires you to know the inner workings of a cinder cone volcano or the exact date Samuel de Champlain first popped up a tent somewhere along the Saint Lawrence River, would you really rank the memorization of that information ahead, in potential societal impact, of learning CPR and first aid techniques?

Indeed, in the great list of essential high school curricula, learning CPR and first aid training should score somewhere in importance under learning English and above sewing a handbag.

And not just one PE class worth of training either.

If it took half-an-hour of practicing twice a week for my vocal jazz choir to perfect the musical intricacies of Paul Anka’s Put Your Head on My Shoulder than maybe we should be dedicating twice as much time teaching today’s high schoolers how to help maintain the lives of those who still enjoy Mr. Anka’s music.

How great would it be if every year, our school system turned out thousands of competent, confident amateur first aid technicians to roam the streets and malls to happenstance upon medical situations where they could be of some assistance?

And what if disaster strikes?

Now that we have upgraded some of their schools, why not have students pick up little emergency first aid kits from the bin at the back of the field and head home to check on the rest of us?

“Hey kid, my taxes paid for that kit; now get over here and stop my severed leg from bleeding out.”

Let’s add CPR and first aid to the provincially mandated high school curriculum so we can train our province’s youth to become as intimate with these lifesaving techniques as they are with the friends and family members they might be called on to help save.

Bruce Walkinshaw is a reporter with the Penticton Western News.

city@pentictonwesternnews.com