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On May 11, Shannon Willner and her sisters took their mother shopping in Leduc for her Mother’s Day present when their family outing turned into a nightmare.

“My mom became short of breath. When her lips turned blue, my one sister called 911.”

While one sister was on the phone with 911 dispatch, Willner noticed her mother started to convulse.

READ MORE: Alberta mother raises defibrillator awareness in son’s memory

“I moved her out of the Walmart so the ambulance could find us quicker and dispatch at that time had asked us to find a defibrillator.”

Willner said she ran to the customer service desk and asked if they had one.

“They looked at me, confused.”

Willner said staff paged management.

READ MORE: Walmart Canada mulls adding defibrillators to stores

“I waited for three minutes. Management never came. At that time, my third sister came in and said the ambulance was there.

“During the three minutes I was there, my mom went into cardiac arrest and the ambulance wasn’t able to bring her back.”

Willner said the family is not looking for anything from the company; they want to prevent something like this from happening again.

“I just really don’t want another family to go through what we did.”

READ MORE: Make defibrillators mandatory in B.C., says Heart and Stroke Foundation

Willner wishes the employees knew whether the store had an automated defibrillator (AED) or not. If she was told immediately there wasn’t one on site, Willner said she would have tried another store nearby.

In Alberta, there are no rules requiring AEDs in businesses or public places.

Alberta Occupational Health and Safety does not have any requirements about the placement of AEDs in businesses. If employers chose to add one, they must “ensure the use of AEDs is integrated into the emergency response plan and first aid program,” a government spokesperson said.

Watch below: A Fairview mother is on a mission to educate young people about using AEDs, in the wake of her 16-year-old son’s death. Su-Ling Goh shares her story.

“I’d like visible AEDs in the stores,” Willner said. “I’d like trained staff to know where they are — all the staff, not just management. I would like more first aid,” she said.

“It’s been hard on our family. It happened too quick. Maybe it could have helped.”

In an email to Global News, Walmart Canada said: “We are very sorry to hear about the experience our customer had at our store. Walmart ensures that we meet the requirements across Canada to have trained CPR / First aid responders in our stores.”

READ MORE: Flight crew hailed as life savers after using AED on man at Edmonton airport

Alberta Health Services would like to see more public spaces offer AEDs. When an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest happens, survival rates are as low as 10 per cent.

“Automated external defibrillator use is one of the critical links in the chain of survival,” said Alex Campbell, an EMS public information officer for AHS.

“To have someone survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, the most important parts are… someone recognizing that there’s a cardiac arrest and starting CPR immediately, calling 911, and then using an automated defibrillator if one is available.”

AHS has 3,000 registered AED locations.

“We encourage as many people as possible to get training in both CPR and AED use,” he added.

“If you’re a business or organization that has an automated defibrillator, we encourage you to register it at heart-safe.ca as well as make sure you have an emergency plan in place that includes retrieving the automated defibrillator when it’s required.”

READ MORE: Edmonton company helps St. John Ambulance launch online First Aid training courses

Campbell explained there’s no law that dictates where AEDs need to be publicly accessible other than in certain types of work sites, depending on the proximity to medical care and the number of workers.

“Using an automated defibrillator is actually quite easy,” he said. “When you open them up, they give you auditory prompts on what steps to go through… You open it up, you remove the pads from the package, place them on the person’s chest and it will actually walk you through it.”

In light of her mother’s death, Willner hopes AEDs become much more common.

“She was a very wonderful lady. She would give you a hard time but yet she would defend you if you needed it.”

READ MORE: ‘That is what saved my life’: Why more businesses in New Brunswick are installing defibrillators

Leanda Joan Frederickson was fighting cancer but didn’t have any heart issues, her daughter told Global News. She did have high blood pressure.

“She loved her family. She supported her family. She’s the one who made the family meals. She had 11 siblings. She made sure we all got together.”

Someday, Willner might go back to the store to see if there is an AED. The company has not said if the Leduc location has one.

“I can’t go back to that store to check,” she said Friday. “I would like to but right now I’m not ready.”

© 2018 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.

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CODY was scuba diving when he was tapped on the shoulder by his mate who pointed out large shadow. Soon they were being circled by a massive great white shark.

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Hours after finishing a first aid training course, Nancy Ofanoa was giving CPR on the side of the road — saving a man’s life.

Two weeks ago, Auckland resident Ofanoa, 28, was sober driving friends home after a night out when they came across the a car that had crashed into a power pole.

After scouring the scene in the dark, Ofanoa said she found the driver out of the vehicle and on a patch of grass alongside the road.

He “could hardly even take one or two breaths a minute”, and emergency services were nowhere to be seen.​

Having completed a first aid course through St John just the day before, her training kicked in.

“Something switched,” she said.

Ofanoa rolled the man onto his side, slightly opening his airway, and he began to splutter.

While on the phone to 111, Ofanoa administered CPR until paramedics arrived and took him to hospital.

The driver has since been discharged from hospital.

Ofanoa said it “shocked” her how calm she was.

“I couldn’t believe I had only just learned to do first aid and here I was actually performing CPR. It was such a coincidence. So lucky.”

But St John’s head of first aid training Julian Price said Ofanoa’s reaction was the “ultimate result” of quality first aid training and exactly what St John aims to achieve.

“It just goes to show that you never know when you’re going to need it.

“If she hadn’t have reacted when and how she did the patient probably wouldn’t have survived. Massive kudos to her,” Price said.

Early first aid intervention can be life-saving – so where bystanders often stand back unequipped, it’s better to do something than nothing, he said.

Confident bystanders who have the right skills can literally save lives, Price said.

“In Nancy’s case, she’s done the training then only a day later has the confidence and competence to put it into practise and save a life – what more could you ask for?”

St John provides first aid training to tens of thousands of New Zealanders each year.

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A long-term study managing asthma during pregnancy has found a way to halve the rates of asthma attacks for expectant mothers, while paving the way for asthma prevention in their children.

Catherine Rosser, who participated in the study, has wheezed through life since she was a child, but was not diagnosed with asthma until she was in her twenties.

“At first I didn’t know what was happening. I thought, am I having panic attack?” she said.

“I felt like perhaps at some point when I’d get it quite badly, I thought I might die.”

Children whose mothers have asthma are more likely to develop the condition themselves, but Ms Rosser’s son is asthma-free.

“They [the researchers] said that his breathing capabilities and his lung capacity and function and functionality was extremely good,” she explained.

“And that he definitely had no signs of being asthmatic at all.”

Breath test helps monitor condition

When Ms Rosser was pregnant with her son 10 years ago, she was part of a trial run by the Hunter Medical Research Institute and the University of Newcastle, looking at asthma management during pregnancy.

“Asthma in pregnancy affects around 10–12 per cent of pregnant women in Australia,” Vanessa Murphy, one of the study’s key researchers from the University of Newcastle, said.

“And I don’t think we take that seriously enough because it can have major impacts on the health of both the mother and the baby.

“Women who have asthma are known to be at risk of adverse outcomes of pregnancy such as pre-term birth and low birth weight.”

The researchers gave one group a traditional asthma management plan, so expectant mums were medicated based on their symptoms, such as coughing or wheezing.

Ms Rosser was put in the second group.

“What we tested was a strategy where we measured lung inflammation, using a simple breath test, and we used the results of the breath test to determine how much medication the woman should be using and we adjusted her medication each month,” Dr Murphy said.

“What we found was this approach significantly reduced the rate of asthma attacks in pregnancy by half.

“And what we’ve done in this study is followed up the children when they were four to six years old, and looked at how many of them had asthma and we find again, almost a 50 per cent reduction in doctor-diagnosed asthma in pre-school aged children.”

The study also found that for those children who did develop asthma, they presented less often to emergency departments for asthma attacks and needed less medication to relieve their symptoms.

Findings could have huge implications

Asthma kills 400 people and causes 37,000 hospitalisations a year in Australia alone, with children aged up to 14 being hospitalised at a significantly higher rate.

With such stark figures facing the medical world, researchers believe the findings could have profound implications.

“To see such a clear and robust and impressive effect, I have to say was obviously a nice surprise,” said study researcher Joerg Mattes, from the John Hunter Children’s Hospital.

“To identify a prevention for asthma is considered to be the holy grail within our research and this finding, which is unexpectedly very clear and very significant, we believe has large implications because it is the most effective asthma prevention that has been demonstrated so far.”

Asthma Australia has welcomed the report, and said it would study the findings further.

“This is really important for prevention, for primary prevention,” said the organisation’s senior manager for research policy and advocacy Anthony Flynn.

“It’s probably the next degree of significant impact that we can have as a community after finding a definitive cure for asthma.”

The method used by researchers is currently not available to the broader community, but Mr Flynn said it could be something looked into in the future.

“A lot needs to be done in regards to understanding potentially the implication or translation of these results to other populations,” Mr Flynn said.

“It seems to have great potential in other populations but we’d have to understand that a lot better and work with the experts to work out what would be the best place for us to campaign and advocate for a duplication in practice now.”

The research is published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

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Mental health is just as important as physical health – so one organisation is educating society on how to recognise the symptoms and signs of common mental health issues and help in a moment of need.

Based on the first aid model – the first responders to physical injury – Mental Health First Aid England (MHFA) is the mental health equivalent.

Through Mental Health First Aid training classes, a MHFA certification teaches people how to “effectively guide a person towards the right support, be that self-help or professional services.”

Poppy Jaman, CEO and co-founder of MHFA, told The Independent: “We teach people how to talk about mental health issues. What we call mental health literacy.”

The organisation, founded in 2000 in Australia, has grown exponentially since it first reached England in 2007.

To date, MHFA has trained just under 300,000 people in mental health first aid and three million globally. But they have a long way to go before they reach their goal of one in 10 people of the English population or five million people.

According to Jaman, the goal number is based on the tipping point theory – when you educate enough people on a subject to the point that it tips society over to normalising whatever the issue is.

In this case, Jaman wants “society to be, when I say ‘health,’ everyone understands mental and physical and not just physical.

“Mental health being a normal part of every day, every family, every community.”

To normalise and educate people about how to deal with their own stress and mental health, and how to have a conversation about the topic with others, MHFA offers two-day, one-day, or half-day courses.

In these courses, participants learn five main components that can then help them change and influence the conversation about mental health, and ultimately change the world.

First, Jaman told us: “The number one thing you learn is that a mental health first aid course will not teach you to be a therapist.”

Second: “Anybody is capable of having a compassionate positive conversation about mental health.”

Third, and importantly, the courses teach participants “how to have the conversation.” This includes the structure of an open conversation about mental health.

Participants then learn “how to take that conversation and explore whether somebody is having thoughts of suicide.”

“We teach people how to have a confident conversation about suicide,” Jaman told us. “How to have a really empathetic conversation when people are experiencing great distress.”

And finally: “Self-care and all we can do to prevent ourselves getting unwell in the first place,” which can include the same things we do for physical health – “eating healthy, exercising regularly, but also giving time to things that are meaningful in our life, volunteering, spending time with friends and projects that are close to our heart, medication, walking, sitting and reading.

“It is recognising that all of those things are important parts of a balanced life,” Jaman said.

This dedication to education around mental health, as well as a changing conversation about mental health issues, has made a big impact on the prevalence of the topic in society and everyday life.

The changing conversation is partly due to the fact that “high profile people, celebrities, and average people are all coming out and talking about their stories.”

This means people are seeing others openly discuss mental health, which opens the conversation up for a more accepting discourse.

Of this shift in society, Jaman said: “Society has woken up to the fact that discrimination can no longer be.”

For Mental Health Awareness Week, May 14 to 20, MHFA has launched a campaign, #addressyourstress,” which teaches people about stress and the most common sources, as well as self-care techniques they can use to deal with stress.

Because “one in six adults in Britain will experience depression, anxiety or problems related to stress at any one time,” MHFA is taking action to help people manage their stress levels.

As for the ultimate goal, Jaman told us: “We want to not have to hide any health-related issues we might be having.

“We are looking to create a more compassionate world and a more compassionate society.”

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A Chief from Canadian Fleet Pacific says everyone should undergo first aid training after he used his expertise to save the life of a Nanaimo man in cardiac arrest in March.

Chief Petty Officer Second Class Paul McCoy, 52, is in the 32nd year of his career with the Royal Canadian Navy and currently works in his unit’s Underwater Warfare branch as a Coastal Advisor on Sonar Operations.

But he also works a part-time job as a First Aid instructor for the St. John Ambulance training centre in his hometown of Duncan. On March 10, one of his students, 66-year-old Earl Morris, suffered a cardiac arrest during his class.

“It happened to Earl in the right place at the right time,” said CPO2 McCoy. “If you are going to have a heart attack, have it in a first aid class where there are people fully trained and willing to help.”

The incident occurred as the class was taking a break and Chief McCoy was in the hallway. A student rushed to him to say Morris had collapsed in his chair, was unresponsive and not breathing. CPO2 McCoy, with the help of another instructor and student, sprang into action and used their training and equipment to save the heart attack victim’s life.

CPO2 McCoy, who is certified as an Occupational First Aid Level 3 and Advanced Medical First Responder, assessed Morris’ condition and then moved him to the ground. He performed CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) while the other instructor administered oxygen.

CPO2 McCoy used a defibrillator to keep him alive while his student and the other instructor continued to perform CPR until paramedics arrived. Paramedics then used their defibrillators approximately six times before Morris was stable enough to be transported to hospital. He has since recovered.

McCoy is quick to downplay the hero moniker bestowed on him by Cowichan Training Centre’s supervisor Anne Saele, and fellow students and instructors.

“I don’t see myself as a hero. I was just a guy who was there, but it’s definitely one in the win column for me and Mr. Morris,” he said.

CPO2 McCoy received his First Aid Instructor certification while serving in HMCS Calgary in 2007. Over the course of his life he has used his first aid training to save the lives of others. Those include severely injured accident victims of a head-on-collision on the Malahat Pass, and two pedestrians who were struck by a vehicle in Sooke.

He recommends first aid training and refresher training to everyone.

“The training gives you the tools and confidence to properly perform first aid,” he said.  “It could be you or someone you love lying there next time. If you know what to do, you will be able to jump in and help. Everyone should have this training.”

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Having a severe allergic reaction without an EpiPen on hand is a life-compromising nightmare: Without immediate medical attention, a person suffering from a nut allergy or a bee sting or some other intense intolerance could go into anaphylactic shock—which occurs in 1 in 50 Americans and could lead to death in as few as 15 minutes. That’s why one research team decided to create an app that would potentially put the epinephrine-injecting, life-saving tool into someone’s hand far quicker than an ambulance can arrive on the scene.

Researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel created EpiMada, an app that uses the same algorithms as ride-sharing services to match a person with someone nearby who carries an EpiPen, according to Mental Floss. Here’s how it the service is intended to work: Let’s say your allergy is triggered, you don’t have an EpiPen on you, and a medical team won’t arrive on the scene in time to help before you go into anaphylactic shock (typically 3 to 30 minutes after exposure, so act fast). Using EpiMada, a total stranger could jump in and rescue you with their personal EpiPen—the infamously prohibitively expensive adrenaline-dispensing device 3.6 million Americans were reportedly were prescribed in 2015 alone. But regarding that high cost, app co-creator Michal Gaziel Yablowitz, a doctoral student, says in a press release that “preliminary research results show that allergy patients are highly motivated to give their personal EpiPen to patient-peers in immediate need.”

“With hundreds of allergy sufferers signed on and more to follow, we hope that this initiative helps save crucial minutes to first epinephrine use.” —app co-creator Dr. David G. Schwartz

For safety reasons, each user with a current epinephrine prescription will be individually accepted into the app—and to use the service, you have to apply to join the community, which is reportedly growing. “The potential of leveraging patients carrying the same medication to respond in emergencies is enormous,” EpiMada co-creator David G. Schwartz, PhD, says. “With hundreds of allergy sufferers signed on and more to follow, we hope that this initiative helps save crucial minutes to first epinephrine use.”

Unfortunately, the app is currently only available in Israel, but the researchers are working on similar services around the world: One in Philadelphia is currently using the same concept as EpiMada but with naloxone, a drug that can reverse opioid overdoses.

This is yet another example that illustrates how technology can be used to improve people’s access to health care.

Should you be worried about the allergy version of seasonal affective disorder? Also, here are five allergy-fighting foods.

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MOTORISTS are now required to follow a new road rule when passing cyclists and could face a hefty $330 fine if they break it.

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THE actions of the those who keep our beaches safe were honoured at a memorial service yesterday.

Surf lifesavers have been raising the red and yellow flags every weekend and public holiday since September, and will now take a well-earned rest over the winter months before the next season kicks off towards the end of this year.

During this time, volunteers from across the Wide Bay Capricorn region have watched over more than 118,300 beachgoers and combined to perform 7897 preventative actions to help proactively protect swimmers in and around the water.

In addition, volunteers treated 553 first aid patients and, most importantly, directly saved the lives of 23 beachgoers through in-water rescues.

SLSQ regional operations manager Craig Holden said local lifesavers had performed a wonderful job over the season.

“Our volunteer surf lifesavers have performed an outstanding job this season, and there’s no doubt they’ve earned a chance to put their feet up and relax over the next few months,” he said.

“A lot of people don’t realise how much work it takes to protect our beaches – it’s not just patrols any more, there’s a lot of training, fundraising, operations, and club activities that go on behind the scenes to make sure our volunteers are ready and able to perform their roles.”

To mark the final weekend of patrols, surf lifesavers gathered at Bundaberg SLSC for a special memorial day service to pay their respects to those who have lost their lives in the ocean this season and those from within the surf family who have passed, including Bundaberg’s Gemma Henricksen, who lost her battle with cancer last month.

The ceremony saw surf lifesavers in full patrol uniform lay a red and yellow wreath of flowers as a mark of respect.

There have been five drownings on Queensland beaches this season: three on the Sunshine Coast, one at Herron Island, and one at Emu Park.

All drownings occurred at either unpatrolled locations or outside patrol times and Mr Holden said it was a reminder to put safety first.

“Unfortunately, we’ve seen five people drown on Queensland beaches across the season and, as far as we’re concerned, that’s obviously five too many,” he said.

“It’s a heartbreaking reminder about the need to respect the ocean at all times and swim only at patrolled locations and during designated patrol times,

With the volunteer season coming to a close, beaches across the Wide Bay Capricorn region will continue to be patrolled by SLSQ’s professional lifeguards.

Meanwhile, SLSQ will remain active across the winter months through its 24/7 emergency response groups, which are now active in all regions across the state.

BY THE NUMBERS

First aid treatments

Wide Bay Capricorn: 553

Queensland-wide: 10,839

Preventative actions

Wide Bay Capricorn: 7897

Queensland-wide: 65,924

Beach attendance

Wide Bay Capricorn: 119,165

Queensland-wide: 3,015,744

Rescues

Wide Bay Capricorn: 23

Queensland-wide: 863