TempoLife › Features › Defibrillators and cardiac arrest response › training
Learning it properly
A short course changes what you do at three in the morning far more than reading does. What a basic life support course covers, who runs them in this region, how often to refresh, and what to teach a school.
CPR in sixty seconds
- Unresponsive and not breathing normally? Gasping is not breathing. Treat it as a cardiac arrest.
- Call 112 (113 in Norway). Speaker on, phone on the floor. Stay on the line — the dispatcher will coach you.
- Push hard and fast in the centre of the chest: 5–6 cm in an adult, 100–120 per minute, letting the chest come all the way back up.
- Send somebody else for a defibrillator. Do not go yourself unless it is seconds away. Keep compressing.
- Turn the device on and do what it says. It decides whether to shock. After a shock, go straight back to compressions.
This is a reference written for bystanders, not a diagnosis, a training course or medical advice. It cannot tell you what is wrong with a particular person, and it does not replace the dispatcher on the other end of an emergency call — they can see what is near you and they will talk you through it. If you are worried about your own heart, or about a symptom, that is a conversation with a clinician rather than a page on a website.
Why a course beats a page
Reading tells you the rate and the depth. A course tells your hands what five centimetres feels like, makes you fail at it on a manikin with a feedback light, and rehearses the sequence often enough that it survives adrenaline. That rehearsal is the entire value: in a real arrest people do not reason, they execute whatever they have practised. Everything on this surface is written to support that, not to replace it.
What a basic course covers
A standard adult basic life support and defibrillation course runs three to four hours and covers recognising an arrest, calling for help, compressions and ventilation on a manikin with feedback, using a training defibrillator, the recovery position, and choking. Paediatric variants add infant and child technique. Longer first-aid certificates fold that into bleeding, burns, fractures and unconsciousness, and are what most workplaces actually need for their nominated first-aiders.
Where to take one in this region
The national Red Cross societies run public courses in all of these countries — the Estonian, Finnish, Latvian and Lithuanian Red Cross among them — as do the national resuscitation councils, heart associations, ambulance services and a substantial commercial training sector. The national resuscitation councils are also the bodies that certify instructors and align course content with the European guidelines, so a course accredited by them or by the European Resuscitation Council is a reliable filter when you are choosing between providers.
Skills fade, and the fix is short and frequent
Compression depth, rate and confidence measurably decay within months of a course, and a single certificate five years old is not the same thing as competence. The practical answer used by workplaces that take this seriously is not a longer course but a shorter, more frequent one: a thirty-minute refresher on a manikin every six to twelve months, plus a walk to the defibrillator so people know where it is and what the cabinet looks like open.
Teaching schools is the highest-leverage version
The single most effective public-access intervention anywhere is teaching schoolchildren, because they learn quickly, they retain it, they teach their parents, and they turn into a generation of adults who start compressions without hesitating. Two hours a year, from around the age of twelve, is the widely used prescription and it needs a manikin and a teacher rather than a clinician. Several countries in this region have this in the curriculum in some form; where it is not, a local club, fire brigade or Red Cross branch will usually come and do it.
Sources: European Resuscitation Council · Estonian Red Cross (Eesti Punane Rist) · Finnish Red Cross (Suomen Punainen Risti) · Latvian Red Cross · Suomen Elvytysneuvosto (Finnish Resuscitation Council) · checked 2026-09-08
Frequently asked questions
How long does a CPR and defibrillator course take?
A basic adult life support and defibrillation course is typically three to four hours. Full workplace first-aid certificates take one to two days because they cover bleeding, burns, fractures and unconsciousness as well.
How often should I refresh?
Annually is the common recommendation, and short frequent practice beats a long infrequent course. Compression quality and confidence measurably decline within months of training.
Who runs courses in the Nordic and Baltic countries?
The national Red Cross societies, the national resuscitation councils, heart associations, ambulance services and commercial providers. Courses aligned with the European Resuscitation Council guidelines are the reliable filter.
How the system around it works
The chain of survival, link by link
Recognition and a call, early CPR, early defibrillation, advanced care and recovery. What each link is actually worth, which one the public owns, and where the chain breaks in practice.
What the survival numbers actually say
Roughly one in ten survives an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, and the spread between towns is wider than the spread between treatments. How to read the statistics without being misled by them.
National registers, and getting your device into one
A defibrillator the dispatcher cannot see barely exists. What a national register is, which one is the real one in each country, why registration is free, and the paid look-alikes to avoid.
Volunteer responder systems
Denmark, Sweden and Norway alert trained volunteers by phone to arrests near them — one to fetch the defibrillator, one to start compressions. How the systems work, who can join, and what happens when your phone goes off.
Where public defibrillators actually are
The green sign with the heart and the lightning bolt, the places that reliably have one, the cabinets that are locked and the ones that are not, and what to do when you have thirty seconds to decide whether to go looking.
Everything on this subject
Before the emergency, there is a long quiet stretch
Blood pressure, resting heart rate, movement and sleep are the part of this you can act on for years beforehand. TempoLife keeps them in one place, free to start.