First aid and emergency health training content

First, it doesn’t cause trouble, and second, it saves lives.

Last year, when I was working as a first-aid training volunteer in a community, I met Aunt Zhang, who had just retired, and raised her hand and asked, Do you need to memorize the compression depth and frequency of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to be accurate? The two lecturers present at the time gave completely different answers: The doctor from the emergency department of a tertiary hospital repeatedly emphasized that the data must be recorded accurately. A compression frequency of 100-120 times/minute and a compression depth of 5-6 cm are almost impossible, otherwise the broken ribs will cause confusion in subsequent treatment. ； Another team leader who has been doing mountain rescue for five years waved his hand and said that for ordinary people, if they really encounter a scene where a passerby falls to the ground, it is more important to dare to reach out and press the button than to press it to a 100% standard. This is also the most common dispute point in the field of first aid training today: Should the priority be to ensure operational specifications, or to prioritize lowering the threshold so that more people dare to participate?

No matter how the opinions differ, cardiopulmonary resuscitation + automated external defibrillator (AED) operation is the most important content in all first aid training. After all, the golden rescue time for cardiac arrest is only 4 minutes. Waiting for 120 to arrive has most likely missed the best opportunity. When I gave charity training to middle schools last time, I found that a 15- or 16-year-old child can fully learn the AED's voice prompt process by touching the simulator twice and reading it once. On the contrary, many adults are always afraid that they will press the wrong button and stand nearby and dare not reach out. In fact, all AEDs on the market now are voice-guided. You can just follow the prompts and you will not make any mistakes.

Except for sudden death first aid, which receives the most attention, most of the remaining content in the training is customized according to the audience. Most of the trainings for corporate employees focus on the treatment of cuts, burns, sprains and other common injuries in the workplace. They even break down common misunderstandings such as whether to look up when a nose bleeds, whether fish bones are stuck in the throat, and whether to apply hot or cold compresses when a foot is twisted. I have encountered this before. The executive of an Internet company said that they specially added the content of "identifying the signs of myocardial infarction" in the training last year. Later, a young man complained of chest tightness and numbness in the tips of his left fingers while working overtime. His colleagues sent him directly to the hospital. They found out that it was a sign of 90% coronary artery blockage, and he saved his life. If training is provided to outdoor enthusiasts, the content will be much wilder. I have participated in the emergency training of the Mountaineering Association before, and I also practiced using trekking poles and jackets and pants to make temporary fracture fixators on site. It is much more practical than using wooden boards taught in the textbook. It also added content on the use of tourniquets, snake and insect bite treatment, first aid for hypothermia and other high-risk outdoor risks.

Many people tend to ignore the "emergency health" part, thinking that first aid is only useful for trauma and sudden death. In fact, most of the current training will include the treatment of common emergencies: how to feed sugar water for hypoglycemia and coma, how to use ventolin for acute asthma attacks, how to lie down in hypertensive emergencies, and how to use an epinephrine pen for anaphylactic shock. These contents may seem trivial, but when someone around you is in trouble, the probability of using them is much higher than those who know how to perform CPR.

As for whether training requires a first aid certificate, there is still no consensus in the industry. Those who support the certification believe that only passing the Red Cross's practical assessment and obtaining the official first aid certificate means that you have truly mastered the operating standards and dare to take action even if you encounter problems. Even if there is an operating accident, you can still be protected by the Good Person Law of the Civil Code. ； Those who oppose it believe that most ordinary people learn this just to be on the safe side, and there is no need to set too high a threshold. A teacher who has been doing public welfare training for ten years told me that even if you only remember after the class, "Call 120 if someone faints, and don't give medicine randomly if you don't know the situation," the class was not in vain. My own feeling is that watching a teaching video a hundred times online is not as impressive as touching a simulator and practicing bandaging once offline. When something really happens, your mind will most likely go blank. Muscle memory is more effective than anything else.

Last month, I saw someone fainted at the subway station. A little girl in school uniform went up to him, patted his shoulder, called him, and touched his carotid artery. His movements were quite standard. Later, the staff brought candy to the fainted person and fed it to him. It turned out that he had low blood sugar and had not eaten breakfast. Although CPR was not used, the little girl who dared to stand up was much better than the person who was full of theories and dared not reach out. To put it bluntly, first aid training never teaches perfect operations, but the confidence to dare to take action at critical moments, and the common sense not to make fatal mistakes.