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By Brad Smith
March 24, 2009 at 4:51 pm
I was really amazed to read about Gemma Houghton on the Daily Mail’s website, who being an identical twin, sensed her sister was in trouble, stormed in to the bathroom, where she was having a bath, and resuscitated her sister with through skills learnt via first aid training.
What would I have done in that situation? Assuming I was on my own, once I’d assessed the situation and establish that she wasn’t breathing, I’d have phoned an ambulance. Then I would have rescued her sister from the bath, opened the airway, checked for breathing, and assuming normal breathing was absent, suspecting that she’d taken lots of water on board, I’d have given five rescue breaths, before commencing cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
Does this process seem unfamiliar to you? If so, why don’t you learn first aid skills like Gemma? Watch this video to get started:
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I was also interested to read that The Mail says that Gemma thinks first-aid lessons should be made compulsory:
Gemma, a trainee hairdresser, believes first-aid lessons should be made compulsory. ‘You never know when someone is going to need it,’ she said.
So do we. That’s what our Life. Live It campaign is all about.
Have you got any first aid stories you’d like to share?
Tags: cpr, emergency response, First aid, Health and social care
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 4:51 pm and is filed under First aid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Brad is a Red Cross first aider. He covers first aid duties and crews ambulances for our event first aid service. He also provides Red Cross first aid training.
Other posts by Brad Smith
The British Red Cross values comments both complimentary and critical. However, we will not tolerate the following: aggressive or personal criticism of the blogger, breach of copyright, obscene, defamatory, profane, sexually oriented, racially offensive or likewise objectionable comments.
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