Already 10,000 children have been taught how to save a life from a stroke

The HOBIT educational program, launched in 2013 by the International Clinical Research Center of St. Anne’s University Hospital Brno (FNUSA-ICRC), provides innovative and unique method of vital information on how to save the life of a person with a heart attack or stroke. The original targeting of elementary and secondary school students, of which there are already 10,000, has already been extended to the elderly and the general public.

A stroke or heart attack throughout our lives affects every other one of us and 15 million people succumb to these diseases each year. Modern medicine can avert many deaths and sequelae, but treatment is dependent on timely help to the surroundings and the patient’s arrival in the hospital. However, most people do not know what the symptoms of the disease are, how to respond to them properly, or how to prevent them preventively.

All this can be learned during the e-learning program HOBIT, which using simulation scenes (short videos really represent symptoms of the disease) and educational film effectively convey the most important information. The program now involves 114 elementary schools and multi-year grammar schools in the Czech Republic. “Thanks to finding new tools and testing them in the field, our project is showing increasingly better results, ie an increasing short- and long-term retention of stroke knowledge in pupils who have completed the curriculum,” explained Hana Maršálková, HOBIT Project Manager.

Now the project has reached an important milestone – information about the symptoms of the disease and the correct response to it has been passed to a tens of thousands of students. In addition, a new version of the educational film was shot and tested this year. The program was supported – among other institutions – by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic by auspices and accreditation. The program was awarded in cooperation with the Faculty of Education of Masaryk University. In the next half of the year, several accreditation seminars for teachers will take place at which experts will provide them with the latest knowledge of stroke and heart attack or teach them how to use the simulation methodology during the lessons.

Schools can join the HOBIT program at any time during the school year free of charge and without any administrative burden. After registering at www.projekthobit.cz, the teacher can immediately start e-learning with pupils, which takes about 25 minutes in total. Various worksheets, game guides and scenes are also available to remind children of the issue.