Jean-Benoit Legault, The Canadian Press Published Tuesday, June 14, 2022 7:27 AM EDT
Hundreds of thousands of high school students in Canada will receive training on how to respond to someone taking an opioid overdose, including how to inject naloxone, a drug used to reverse the effects of overdoses.
The Advanced Coronary Treatment Foundation announced on Tuesday that its new training program will be in addition to the training in CPR and automated external defibrillators it offers free of charge to high schools across the country.
Each year, in addition to learning how to inject naloxone, some 350,000 students will learn about opioids and how to identify when to call 911, when to do cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and when to administer naloxone. The training will be deployed first in Quebec, Alberta, Ontario and British Columbia before expanding to other provinces.
“The (opioid) crisis is very real,” Jocelyn Barriault, the foundation’s medical director, said in a recent interview.
The Public Health Agency of Canada reported more than 5,386 opioid-related deaths between January and September 2021. The majority of deaths, 94%, were accidental.
“Heart arrests … don’t go down well with young people,” Barriault said. “But with opioids, there’s a good chance he’s a classmate … going to school or a party.”
If a young person is facing someone with heart failure, Barriault said, he or she will receive training on how to administer naloxone. “And hopefully it will work; but if we don’t do anything, obviously not.”
Barriault said the training, which was developed after a successful pilot project in Ottawa involving 186 students and 15 teachers in 2019, will be an opportunity to teach young people how to react in emergencies and the risks of opioids.
Carole Nadeau, who runs the training program in Quebec, said between 1,000 and 1,500 Quebec teachers will be trained on how to teach the program to about 70,000 students each year in the province.
“We have trained in 141 schools, which represents 405 teachers ready to teach all their students about opioids,” Nadeau said. “It’s a lot of people.”
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on June 14, 2022.