Have you ever thought how nice it would be to be that person who didn’t panic when an accident happened?” With $169 and just one day of your life YOU have the ability to save people’s lives.
With a mother who is a nurse and my own Personal Training Qualification done and dusted, I figured it was about time to get a first aid course under my belt. When I think of first aid courses the first thought that springs to mind is St John so naturally I attended one of their courses.
Let me make it clear that I am a complete wuss when it comes to all things medical, needles and blood make me cringe a little bit. Now I know this cringing is largely due to not wanting to be poked with needles, have blood oozing from me or to be sick myself and partly due to not knowing what to do if an emergency did arise.
I always kind of dismissed the course as we live in a small town and the hospital is so close that I figured if anything ever really went wrong an ambulance was only a phone call away and the hospital was a short trip.
However as I’ve got older I’ve become more responsible [funny how that happens] and realised that for $169 and 8 hours of my life I can potentially be the difference between someone living or dying.
I was a little nervous about attending the course due to my aforementioned wussiness however I shouldn’t have been worried as our tutor, Darren was seriously amazing!
He pretty much said from the outset that today was all about breaking through some pre-conceived ideas and giving us the confidence to believe that we do in fact know a lot more than we think we do.
The course was undertaken in a fun atmosphere with real life scenarios. To begin with we were given a scenario and then told to use the equipment in front of us to the best of our abilities to assist our patient – I’d estimate that 80% of the time we were pretty much on the money with what we decided to do and with some small tweaks and advice we were soon being assessed and then handed our first aid certificate.
My takeaways from the first aid course are:
- It is very important that more people undertake the courses to gain the confidence and skills to assist in an emergency situation.
- You know more than you think you do.
- The course will assist in giving you the confidence to do the things you know. [So important, none of us were very confident to begin with!]
- First aid is all about doing everything you can for your patient until the professionals arrive.
- Always ensure you are safe when performing any first aid.
- Too many people die in NZ from Asthma which can be prevented. If you see someone having an asthma attack find someone’s [anyone’s!] medication to help the patient. This is the only time where sharing medication is acceptable.
- You perform CPR on dead people.
- At the end of the day if you end up breaking a rib or something like that when undertaking CPR it’s minor in the scheme of things as surgeons and doctors need ALIVE patients to be able to fix them, they can’t do anything if the person is dead and the surest thing to do to keep your patient dead is to NOT perform CPR.
- You actually can be a huge part in saving someone’s life and it’s not that hard you just need to get to a course and then take action if an emergency occurs.
We learnt that the chances of someone in cardiac arrest surviving is as low as 5-8%, however add in CPR until a Defibrillator can be used and then professional medical care through the ambulance [that you called!] or hospital and this jumps up to a staggering 71%.
I know if I were to have an accident I would want some of the passers-by to have attended a first aid course and take action on me as the difference between doing something and not is HUGE!
I challenge you to consider attending a first aid course, they are currently $169 and take one day of your life to potentially save someone else’s life and that is worth a heck of a lot more than $169!
Have you ever done a first aid course? If not, why?!