Cheryle Berry, chair of CSALS, provides the background to the charity and urges more people to learn vital first aid skills…

I know that many thousands of lives could be saved every year if more people were trained to understand basic life-saving skills.

About seven years ago ,with a small group of like-minded friends , we discussed ways of giving free training.

We wanted to make it easy for people to access the training so we would go where they were meeting. Schools, youth groups, sports clubs, church groups and community halls etc.

We called ourselves Community Save a Life Scheme and our dream was to have life savers in every community throughout the UK. This is a tremendous challenge but we were determined to do our best and work with others to achieve this.

Over the first three years, our small group taught 30,000 people and we were very encouraged to hear stories of how lives had been saved by those we had taught.

To raise awareness of our work, we even gained a Guinness World Record for the Largest First Aid Lesson! This was in May 2016 when we had 1,795 young people on the football pitch at Chesterfield FC, learning life-saving Skills.

We were so very grateful for the wonderful support of Chesterfield Football Club, Bolsover District Council and the local Rotary Clubs.

Our dream of thousands of life savers was still daunting and we knew we needed to work smarter not harder to get there.

We approached the Virtual College to see if they could help us to develop an online learning programme to reach out to many more learners.

They were truly amazing as they agreed to develop the programme with us and to host it on their learning platform. As a voluntary group, we had no funds and they have sponsored us.

You can access this free training any time and anywhere. It just takes about an hour and we have had learners from ages 10 to 80+ There is a certificate at the end.

There has been great feedback on the programme and you can see some of the comments here:

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During the pandemic, many people have used time at home to do our programme and have said that they feel more confident now if they had to help at an emergency

Will you help us to achieve our dream of life savers in every community in the UK?

It could be your family and friends who need this help one day.

Please give us one hour of your time to do this online course and tell others about it.

The course is accessed here: www.virtual-college.co.uk/prepared