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Don’t give up

By Chris Jefferies
October 7, 2009 at 6:03 pm

As well as my normal volunteer work I’m currently an intern in my area. Part of my role is co-ordinating our work teaching first aid to vulnerable young people. This may include young offenders, those in the travelling community or young people ‘Not in education, employment or training’ (NEET). Needless to say, these groups pose a range of challenges when running first aid sessions!

Today I was running a session for a group of young people who have been excluded from school. I kicked off by asking about what they thought of first aid. Predictably, many of the responses were negative – “Boring & pointless”, “Waste of time” and most worryingly “I wouldn’t stop and help, its not my problem”.

I then asked if anyone had ever seen someone need help, one young person told a harrowing story about a friend who was ‘jumped’ and stabbed several times in a frenzied and random attack. Others added they had seen friends bottled and assaulted, many had also seen and experienced first hand the effects of hard drug and alcohol abuse.

Oh, this was a group of 13 and 14 year olds.

Time for some first aid I think! We talked about helping someone who has passed out from alcohol, practiced how to place them in the recovery position and protect their airway. I then covered how to deal major bleeding, focused around a stabbing incident. This really caught the groups attention and they asked loads of questions after realising first aid could be relevant to them.

I strongly feel these groups are worthy of the extra time and effort it takes. First aid doesn’t have to be boring lectures or presentations and we certainly shouldn’t ignore these most vulnerable, if not slightly challenging, groups.

Afterwards, I asked again if they’d stop and help someone who had collapsed.

“Yeah, I’d stop. If I was hurt I’d want people to help me”

Just goes to show, don’t give up.

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Comments (6) »

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Tags: First aid, NEET, teaching, violent crime, vulnerable groups, young offenders, young people

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 6:03 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.

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