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"Apparently, according to the policeman who rang to tell me the next day, yes.

I was walking up my road, with my (pretty useless) boyfriend at the time, on our way to put a bet on the grand national and we came across this old gentleman who had just sort of keeled over into the hedge. There were two ladies just off the bus, standing there looking at him and ringing 999, but nobody had actually touched him.

With the lady from 999 on the phone giving instructions (useless boyfriend held it up to my ear) I gave him CPR. I had covered CPR in first aid courses before (but I don't have a certificate) and it was nice to have some help from the end of the phone.

His heart had stopped and he wasn't breathing when I turned him over but the deal is that you keep going until a doctor decides what to do. Some policemen passing in a car, came over to help and gave me a plastic tube thingy to use to breath into his lungs and one of them took over the heart massage.

According to the policeman who rang the next day his heart started again in the ambulance.

About 4 months later I got a letter from an assistant commissioner of the Met Police thanking me for what I'd done; he said that members of the public are sometimes unwilling to intervene but in situations such as this immediate first aid was vital.

It made me sad to think that people would be unwilling to help an old man in the street and I thought that I didn't want to live in a society where people don't help each other. So, it was one of the contributing factors to me getting more involved in my community and eventually in politics; because if I don't get involved, why should I expect anybody else to. I'm proud of what I did and it gave me confidence to know that I'm OK in a crisis and could do it again! Jo"

And Karen emailed too:

"Not proper lifesaving but whilst at University in Portsmouth I did come across a chap laying on the path outside a shop. He'd been there for several hours and people had assumed that he was drunk.

He had actually been assaulted the night before and was a diabetic. Not much to do really other than check he was maintaining an airway and circulation and monitor his responses. He did get taken to hospital for further treatment. It was 2.15pm when I called the ambulance and it wasn't a quiet back street he was in.

Before I went to Uni I was a Red Cross Youth leader teaching first aid to young people from the rougher end of Ipswich. At a duty the adult group were covering we came across a paramedic who had picked up a casualty from an RTA and was certain that it was our kids there at the scene. We asked at the next meeting and three 10 year olds said in a wonderfully dismissive way, "Yeah, that was us."

According to the paramedic he arrived on the scene to find 3 smallish people organising a bunch of adults to stop traffic, sort police, keep hold of witnesses, etc whilst they attended to a chap who had been knocked off his bike by a car and had a really badly bleeding head injury. The paramedic recalls that these youngsters were treating the chap in a completely correct manner - supporting his shoulders, applying direct pressure to the wound with the brand new J cloths they'd been sent out to buy and saying reassuring words about "head wounds make a lot of blood for a small cut." He also recalled that they started discussing football with him and specifically that if he supported Norwich then the head injury may do him some good.

Obviously we asked the kids what they were playing at and they said that they'd cottoned on to the fact that if they stopped talking to their casualties at their first aid exams then the doctor would instruct the casualty to pretend to go unconscious or vomit. We got a donation from the casualty (we think) to the group funds. One of the bystanders at the scene gave the kids some sweets to share once the ambulance had gone. They didn't see it as anything wonderful that they had done - just something they'd been taught to do.

The youth members did comment that none of the adults would take a lead although once they started organising themselves they were "assisted" by a lady who felt qualified to assist as she watched "Casualty." She was assigned to traffic control.

The same mob also spotted a semi-conscious diabetic at the Suffolk Show that the St John Ambulance has just walked past and treated them appropriately.

I'm still a first aid trainer and first aider for the Red Cross. Unfortunately my rag-tag bunch of kids are no more with BRCS as the Red Cross Youth service ended in 2000. It's a real shame."

And then there was this:

"No but two plane flights in a row I got caught by the "is there a doctor on board" wheeze. And do you know I didn't even get a free drink out of the airline afterwards !!!
Dr. Tom Goodfellow, Coventry"