first aid for children, teaching first aid in schools

Creating a generation of lifesavers

Jon Handcock outlines the latest British Red Cross initiative for acquiring first aid skills

The revised QCA guidelines for PHSEE KS3 outline knowledge of basic first aid as a core component of personal wellbeing. Educators with little or no experience of the topic need not fear: The British Red Cross has just what the doctor ordered.

Why first aid matters
Every year in the UK, 3m people turn up at A&E departments with injuries that first aid could have lessened or treated. More than 12,000 people die each year from accidents and injury – more than 20 every day. On average, there are nine deaths every day from transport accidents, and one death every day from exposure to smoke, fire and flames. Heart attacks and seizures are one of the UK’s biggest killers, with more than 180 deaths every day. First aid skills have the potential to save a life in these types of circumstances.

In situations like these, first aid provided within the first few minutes is the deciding factor, and can mean the difference between life and death. Immediate CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) can double or even triple a heart attack casualty’s chances of survival. If someone is unconscious with a blocked airway they can have as little as four minutes to live – unless someone else knows how to intervene. Even knowing how to lessen blood loss from an injury can save someone’s life. Such simple techniques can be taught in minutes.

Life. Live it.
Teaching young people even some of these eight ‘basics’ will save lives. Through the Life. Live it. campaign, the British Red Cross has been raising the profile of first aid education throughout the UK. Thousands of people have written to their MPs in favour of putting these life-saving skills on the agenda. Yet despite government-led initiatives such as ECM and Healthy Schools, frameworks focusing almost exclusively on health and wellbeing, there is little reference to the first aid skill-set in the statutory secondary school curricula of England. The British Red Cross believes that first aid is self-evidently a crucial component of any preventative healthcare curriculum. The explicit inclusion of the requirement of ‘basic first aid knowledge’ within the new expanded PHSEE guidelines nevertheless represents a step in the right direction.

First aid education kit
In consultation with teachers and educational experts, the British Red Cross has produced an innovative new resource designed to support teachers delivering these important life skills to a KS3 or 4 audience. The kit is designed to complement the PHSEE curriculum, but can also be used in many other subjects and settings.

Taken from the kit’s software resources, this exchange captures the elements of first aid beyond the clinical skill.

Teacher: Imagine that you’ve found someone collapsed – who do you think is most important in that situation? Who’s the most important? Yes, at the back?
Student: The person who has collapsed.
Teacher: Do you think… I think that’s a fantastic thing for you to say, but actually I’m going to say you are. All right? Your first thought should actually be ‘Am I going be safe?’

First aid learning puts a great deal of emphasis on individual safety and risk assessment. The message is to make sure you are safe, before you help someone else. There’s much more to first aid learning than you might think – it’s about building the confidence to step forward and make a difference, being a responsible citizen and developing the judgement to know when to act and what to do.

What can you do?
Of course part of the problem with teaching first aid, particularly to young people, is that it’s often viewed as a bit stuffy or old-fashioned. The Life. Live it. kit contains a slick interactive quiz set at a music festival, and manages to make learning life-saving skills relevant and fun. By bringing first aid learning into the classroom in an engaging way, it is hoped to revolutionise how people view the skill-set and help them realise that it’s fun, easy and of course important to learn.

The British Red Cross has already sent every secondary school in the UK a free sample CD-Rom which includes first aid basics lessons as well as the music festival quiz. In addition, 500 full first aid education kits have been sent free to secondary schools around the UK through our local area networks.

The latest MORI research shows that 93% of the British public support first aid education in schools.

Here are five things you can do:

Read Life. Live it: The Case for First Aid Education in Schools, available from www.lifeliveit.org
Tryout the free CD-ROM sent to your school.
Order your school the full first aid education kit from www.redcross.org.uk/shop
Show students the inspirational Life. Live it. DVD, available free from www.redcross.org.uk/shop. Tell them about the free resources they can get from www.lifeliveit.org, including emergency first aid clips for their mobiles and a foldout pocket first aid guide.
Tell colleagues about first aid education.

‘The eight first aid essentials’
The British Red Cross has identified eight basic ‘first aid essentials’ that all school children should learn:

Dealing with accidents – assessing danger, keeping yourself safe, calling for the emergency services.
Unconsciousness and resuscitation – checking and clearing the airway, checking breathing, the recovery position and CPR.
Choking – checking the severity of choking, using back blows and abdominal thrusts (Heimlich manoeuvre).
Bleeding and shock – compression, elevation of the wound above the heart, bandaging and identifying and treating shock.
Burns and scalds – cooling burns with cold water, and what not to do (such as covering with woolly dressings).
Specific injuries – avoiding further damage to a fractured or broken bone, treatment of sprains and strain.
Specific illnesses – such as heart attacks, diabetic control, asthma attacks, meningitis, epileptic seizures.
Emotional and social – reacting to stress, offering emotional support, the social dimension of helping others in need, and humanitarianism.

Jon Handcock works for First Aid Services at the British Red Cross.

First published in Learning for Life, June 2007

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