Red Cross Blogs

First aid: knot a bad idea

By Alix Miller
December 7, 2009 at 4:03 pm

I have read and written so much about first aid during the 15 months I have been at the Red Cross. So it was great to finally get to grips with my very own plastic dummy at a Red Cross basic first aid course recently.

The timeliness of my course was underlined by a recent first aid emergency in my family; my Mum broke her wrist badly at the top of Scafell Pike while we were doing the 3 Peaks Challenge by Rail, in September.

Two fellow walkers who were also first aiders rushed to her aid (while I stood by like a lemon fussing), followed eventually by Mountain Rescue. I’ll write about her dramatic descent by stretcher in next week’s post.

I have to confess I was a little bit apprehensive about the course. Would I really be able to master CPR? Would my dummy end up with broken ribs or worse  ‘die’?

Would the course involve humiliating demonstrations in front of the class? Yikes. I was having performance anxiety right up until morning of the course. But I needn’t have worried.

The atmosphere was very relaxed. There were six of us and our lovely trainer, Lucy Kiddle, explained and demonstrated everything clearly. It wasn’t just informative and illuminating but quite a giggle too. Tying each other in knots with different sling methods was particularly memorable.

And all of us mastered CPR which really is very simple when you know how. It helps to perform it on a dummy whose chest both clicks when you get the compression pressure right, and rises reassuringly when you get the rescue breaths technique right.

We also tackled other common first aid emergencies such as choking, bleeding, burns and strains and sprains. I have worried about what I’d do if my 16-month old niece choked but was reassured to hear that many of the skills we’d learnt for adult first aid could, with a few tweaks, be applied to babies and children.

Of course it’s not just about rushing headlong into an emergency situation and automatically offering your help. We learnt when it is (and isn’t) appropriate to step into these situations – mainly a case of common sense and protecting your own safety first.

Once you do decide to help out the ‘DR ABC’ acronym is really useful in helping you stay calm and remember the procedure for performing these skills when you might feel panicky. It stands for danger, response, airway, breathing, compressions. Read Brad’s recent post to find out more.

There was also plenty of time to share our own experiences. Susie (pictured above), who had done basic first aid many years ago at school had (together with her friend) been the only first aider at an emergency on a crowded beach last summer in Croatia.

A woman had been pulled from the sea and had stopped breathing. Susie stepped in and performed CPR until paramedics arrived. She told us:

“Even though the outcome of the situation wasn’t good (the lady in question died), I definitely feel better knowing that at least I tried to do something.  It’s also a comfort for me that this lady’s family knew that someone tried to help her.
 
“While practising on a first aid dummy can’t prepare you for the emotional side of having to do CPR in real life, being able to learn the method in a comfortable environment meant that when I needed to act, my training took over, and the panic and emotion was pushed to the back of my mind.”

Inspired to learn more? Find out about our first aid courses and in the meantime, watch these videos about how to perform CPR. It could help you save a life.

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Tags: cpr, Emergencies, First aid, first aid course

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