St John Ambulance ad saying first aid could save 140k lives banned following u-turn by ASA
A St John Ambulance ad, which received 150 complaints when it was first aired in November 2012 and was not banned by the ASA at the time, has now been banned for being misleading.
The ad saw a man being treated for cancer, recovering and then choking at a barbecue, and stated: "First aid could help prevent up to 140,000 deaths every year. The same number of people that die from cancer."
The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) categories listed in the ONS mortality data for 2010 were compared to the contents of the St John Ambulance First Aid Manual. The number of deaths were added up for each category where St John Ambulance considered that first aid may have contributed to a person's survival or prevented their death, giving a total of 139,907 deaths.
The ASA has now said: “We understood that Full Fact believed the 140,000 figure was misleading because St John Ambulance had taken the total number of deaths for each category and had not reduced it to take into account the effectiveness of first aid on survival rates. We acknowledged that was the case, noting St John Ambulance 's comment that there was little or no evidence relating to the probability of first aid preventing death from certain conditions and the difficulties in carrying out controlled trials to measure that.”
The ads were created by Bartle Bogel Hegarty.