Montreal - Hundreds of thousands of high school students in Canada will receive training on how to respond to anyone overdosing on opioids, including how to inject naloxone, a medication used to reverse the effects of overdoses.

The Advanced Coronary Treatment Foundation announced on Tuesday that its new training program will be added to the CPR and automated external defibrillator training it provides free of charge in high schools across the country.

In addition to learning how to inject naloxone, about 350,000 students will learn about opioids and how to determine when to call 911, when to perform CPR, and when to administer naloxone. This training will start first in Quebec, Alberta, Ontario, and British Columbia before expanding to other provinces.

For her part, Jocelyne Barolett, the foundation's medical director, said in a recent interview: "The opioid crisis is really serious."

Health Canada reported more than 5,386 opioid-related deaths between January and September 2021. The majority of the deaths, or 94 percent, were accidental.

Barolett said: "Cardiac morbidities may not occur often in young people." "But with opioids, there is a high likelihood it will happen at school or at a party."

Barolett said that if any young person encounters someone with heart failure, they will be trained on how to handle naloxone."

She added that the training, developed after a successful pilot project in Ottawa involving 186 students and 15 teachers in 2019, will be an opportunity to teach young people how to respond in emergencies and the risks of opioids.

On the same topic, Carol Nadeau, who leads the training program in Quebec, said that between 1,000 and 1,500 teachers in Quebec will be trained on how to teach the program to about 70,000 students each year in the province.

Nadeau added: "We have conducted training in 141 schools, which represents 405 teachers ready to teach all their students how to deal with opioids."

Edited by: Dima Abu Khair