MAN ON A MEDICAL MISSION!

15th Sep 2016

You may not have been aware of it, but last Saturday was World First Aid Day, and very appropriately the HKRU Head of Medical Lucy Clarke and her team were out and about running courses and qualifying yet more practitioners to add to our burgeoning 1st aiding community.

A key member of that group for the last 2 years has been a HKIS student by the name of Forrest Holcombe, an individual who has taken a passion for 1st aid and turned it into a crusade to raise awareness and save lives through a campaign to increase the worrying low rates of cardiac arrest survival in Hong Kong.

Forrest first became interested in medical first response when studying in the US, spending his free time helping out his local Volunteer Fire Department, and after his family moved to Hong Kong in 2013 it didn’t take him long to get involved helping out as a 1st aider with local charity events, and then subsequently with Lucy’s Emergency Medical Services team. Since then he has become a regular face at King’s Park Sports Ground looking after the rugby players on a Saturday, and has risen through the ranks to become both a team leader and a trainer.

Together with Lucy and Dr David Owens, the Union and Asia Rugby’s Chief Medical Officer, Forrest next headed to Laos in January of 2015 to help upskill the volunteers working on the Laos Rugby’s Pass It Back grassroots programme, as well as the 1st aiders looking after their domestic and international tournaments. An experience he found so rewarding he is heading back there shortly to spend a further 3 months helping make Laos a sustainable model that hopefully could be rolled-out in other countries around the region in the years ahead.

These are rather impressive accomplishments for a young man to tick off in advance of his 18th birthday, but on top of everything Forrest has set up his own NGO, the Emergency Medical Response Foundation, and has four staff members dedicated to addressing an issue that potentially effects every single member of our society – Hong Kong’s appallingly low cardiac arrest survival rate. While most developed countries come in around the 40% mark, and the best are hitting 60+, we are in the embarrassing position of bottom of the pile with just 1.5%. There are many contributory factors to this, but the key message that Forrest and his team are trying to get across through lobbying and advocacy is that there is plenty of opportunity to improve the situation. Mandatory CPR training for all secondary school students, teams of citizen responders, CPR advice from 999 operators – all of these are initiatives that have been tried and tested elsewhere, and could be introduced in Hong Kong.

“I’m extremely grateful for all the support, advice and encouragement I’ve received from Lucy Clarke and Doctor Owens over the past couple of years,” explains Forrest, “and through their networks I’ve had the opportunity to get involved in Laos and meet some inspiring individuals around the world. My hope for World First Aid Day was very simple – that we can get more people in Hong Kong trained in CPR and get our cardiac arrest survival rate numbers up to where they should be…after all, what can be more important than saving lives?”

To find out more about Forrest’s work contact him on [email protected] and find out more about the HKRU Medical team from [email protected]

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