Parents of Adam Redfern urge students and staff to learn CPR through DMU Heartsafe campus initiative

By Amina Ali

The parents of beloved DMU alumni Adam Redfern have set up a campaign to encourage students and staff to learn the life-saving CPR heart massage technique.

Ian and Christine Redfern helped to launch DMU’s Heartsafe Campus initiative which aims to ensure that as many people on campus as possible can perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) in the case of an emergency.

Their son, Adam, suddenly passed away from a cardiac arrest while out for a jog in 2021.

He was a DMU Journalism graduate who had been heavily involved in the student-run Demon Media and students’ union organisations before working for the university’s press and communications department.

Statistics from the British Heart Foundation show that, when someone has a cardiac arrest, every minute without CPR or defibrillation reduces their chance of survival by up to ten per cent.

The Foundation also found that 43 per cent of UK adults have never learnt CPR.

“We’d love to get to a point where every student at DMU has done online CPR training as a minimum,” said Ian.

“That might be ambitious, but we don’t think it’s unreasonable because there are no barriers. There should be no barriers,” he said.

“And it’s not just people from England that are at university. They’re from all over the country, all over the world,” said Christine.

“Maybe they’ll go back home, then they can then spread the word in their own country,” she added.

In-person training events are planned during February, but Ian and Christine both stress the importance of using free online training tools, such as RevivR.

The fifth memorial football tournament and the fourth ‘Run for Redfern’ event, which raise money for the Adam Redfern Memorial Fund, are also going ahead in 2025.

“They should be occasions where people come together to remember Adam and to celebrate his life,” said Ian.

“But also, those two events are our most important platforms for sharing our key message about cardiac risks in young adults and the importance of anybody who has a cardiac event to receive immediate intervention through CPR and use of a defibrillator,” said Ian.