Essex Mayor Sherry Bondy will be hosting a CPR training course later this month and invited 16 people to join her free of charge.
The program is being offered to teach residents how to be prepared in case of an emergency.
The CPR training course will take place on July 15, 2023 from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Maedel Community Centre.
Essex Mayor Sherry Bondy says CPR, or cardiopulmonary resuscitation, is a valuable life-saving skill that everyone can benefit from...
"It's important with the struggles happening in local health and people might not be able to access medical services as soon as they need to, that we work on building community resiliency and getting as many trained with CPR as we can."
She says the 16 spots filled up within three days and doing more classes will be based on whether they get more participation.
"I think it's a good use of funds to offer this. When we put people out in our community that are trained with CPR, it's just making our community better able to protect itself in case of an emergency."
She says they're looking to host more CPR classes in different wards this fall.
"We want to make them free so there's not an affordability issue for anybody. But we want to them accessible in our different communities so that if anybody has transportation issues or different barriers that they can get to one of these classes and hopefully be a little bit more prepared if heaven forbid something happens."
Bondy says the next session will take place this fall with Councillor Kim Verbeek in McGregor, and another date with Brad Allard and Jason Matyi in Colchester.
To get on the waiting list for future courses, click here.
-With files from AM800's Rob Hindi