Migrant Workers, Singapore’s untapped resource in the fight against OHCA

Summary: Find out how Singapore Heart Foundation actively engages their Ministry of Manpower and lifesaving instructors to equip Singapore’s migrant workers, which make up almost 6% of the population in Singapore, with lifesaving skills.

Synopsis of Presentation: Migrant workers make up almost 6% of the population in Singapore and not all are trained in CPR and knows how to use an AED. If all migrant workers were equipped with lifesaving skills and signed up to be community first responders, they would increase the current pool of responders in Singapore by 3-fold. This increase of trained volunteers who are ready to intervene with early CPR+AED would dramatically change survival outcomes for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest events in Singapore. With such a statistic in mind, the Singapore Heart Foundation (SHF) partnered with the Ministry of Manpower (MoM) under their Project First-Responder programme to equip 2,000 migrant workers in Singapore with CPR+AED skills through the Restart-A-Heart (RAH) simplified CPR+AED training programme.

The RAH training programme is an initiative for people who are keen on learning basic resuscitation steps and usage of an AED but do not require certification. Under this complimentary programme, a participant would only take approximately 1 – 1.5 hours to pick up the core lifesaving skill of CPR+AED.

This presentation will showcase the project’s journey and how SHF actively engages MoM and lifesaving instructors to provide training to Singapore’s migrant workers. It will also showcase how training modules were adapted to cater to language barriers and other learning needs of our migrant friends to ensure that key learnings were achieved.