Free 'Street First Aid' lessons are now available for Jersey teenagers.

This is part of a new Young Responders Programme, delivered by St John Ambulance. 

It's for secondary schoolers over the age of 13 and is designed to teach essential mental and physical first aid skills. 

We're told funding is available to provide this two hour outreach session to every teenager in the island, thanks to funding from the Jersey Community Foundation and Kezia’s Fund.

The classes will cover how to: 

• respond to catastrophic bleeding
• deal with alcohol or drug intoxication 
• perform CPR 
• recognise worrying mental health behaviour.

Trainer Tilly Swift, who has been running the first few sessions at Highlands College, says the course will be tailor-made to addressing questions students may have: 

"The interesting conversations are things like 'What do we do if our friends become intoxicated?', 'How best do we treat them?' and we open up that conversation to talk about the drugs we have in Jersey and what people can do to help.

"The important thing about the course is I am just a facilitator. I'm here to give a little bit of structure but we talk about what they want to talk about.

"We start off with discussing drugs and alcohol, but if they want to talk about that for the rest of the session, that's what we're going to focus on. 

"It's about what they need, and what they need to hear, rather than me standing at the front of the classroom and talking about what we're going to cover that day."