Students in public high schools across Canada will be trained to provide the first aid necessary in the event of an opioid overdose, The Canadian Press has learned first.
The training, which includes the administration of the antidote naloxone, will be added to the cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and automated external defibrillation (AED) program that the ACT Foundation for advanced coronary emergency care already offers free of charge to high schools in all the countries.
In Canada, young people can legally get a dose of naloxone at the pharmacy from the age of 14 years. The training will therefore be offered to young people in the third year of secondary school in Quebec and at the appropriate school level elsewhere in the country.
Some 400 public high schools in Quebec already participate in the ACT Foundation’s CPR / DEA program, which has trained tens of thousands of young people over the years. The Foundation is therefore taking advantage of the infrastructure put in place in the province since 1997 to offer this new program.
In addition to being trained in the nasal administration of naloxone, young people will learn about opioids and how overdoses occur; recognize a suspected opioid overdose; and to intervene in such a situation by calling 911, performing CPR if necessary and offering nasal naloxone.
” Crisis [des opioïdes] is very real”, insists the medical director of the ACT Foundation, Dr.r Jocelyn Barriault, who is also the regional medical director of the Corporation d’Urgences-santé and emergency physician at the Verdun hospital.
Four times more overdoses
The incidence of opioid overdoses quadrupled during the two years of the pandemic, he added, and the number of deaths increased by 25% during the 2020-2021 period. Youth aged 15 to 24 show the highest growth rate among the population requiring hospital care for an opioid overdose.
Since “this scourge” affects mostly young people aged 15 to 24, said Dr.r Barriault, teenagers are the ideal group to train to intervene in the event of an opioid overdose, since they are most likely to witness an overdose in their immediate surroundings.
“Cardiorespiratory arrests of cardiac origin, it does not affect young people that much, he said. But opioids, on the other hand, are much more likely to be a colleague, a contemporary student of the person who is there, whether it happens in school or at a party. »
Faced with another young person in cardiorespiratory arrest, explains the Dr Barriault, “the youngster will do what he knows how to do. He’s going to massage him, but he’s also going to give him narcan (naloxone) and we hope it will work. But if we don’t do anything, it sure won’t work.
Teacher training started
The training of teachers who will then be responsible for training young people has already begun, said program manager in Quebec, Carole Nadeau.
“We did training for 141 schools and that represents 405 teachers who are now ready to offer the opioid component to all their students,” she said. So that’s a lot of people. »
Eventually, in Quebec, between 1,000 and 1,500 teachers will have been trained and who will be able to offer training to 70,000 young people per year, said Ms. Nadeau. The basic implementation in the province should be spread over three years.
The program is first deployed in Quebec, Alberta, Ontario and British Columbia. The other provinces of the country, which have a total of 1,800 public secondary schools where ACT Foundation training is available, will follow.
This new module was developed following the success of a pilot project conducted in Ottawa in 2019, with the participation of 186 students and 15 teachers from four secondary schools of the Ottawa Catholic School Board.
Once the module is rolled out, 350,000 students each year will be offered opioid awareness and opioid emergency response training, in addition to instruction in CPR and DEA.
The Public Health Agency of Canada has reported more than 5,386 apparent deaths related to opioid toxicity, from January to September 2021, including 339 in Quebec. The majority of deaths (94%) from opioid overdoses occur accidentally.
“He’s not always the regular drug addict that people think of,” says Dr.r Barriault. Often it’s young people who have been offered something, who are opioid naïve, and so the effect is much more pronounced in them. »
The training that will be offered in schools will therefore not only aim to teach young people how to react in the event of an emergency, but will also be an opportunity to make them aware of the risks, he added.