What are the basic first aid skills

The basic first aid skills that ordinary people need to master are essentially practical techniques centered on the three core goals of "saving lives, avoiding secondary injuries, and reducing subsequent injuries." There is no high professional threshold. Most of them can be mastered after two or three practices, which is sufficient to deal with more than 80% of daily emergencies.

I have been a teaching assistant in community first aid charity training for almost two years. I have seen too many people who only know about cardiopulmonary resuscitation. They get really panicked when children get stuck in their throats, old people fall and fracture, and family members get burned. In fact, the handling of these daily emergencies is a core component of basic first aid.

The treatment of cardiac and respiratory arrest is definitely the number one life-saving skill. Last year, an uncle in the vegetable market in our jurisdiction collapsed due to a myocardial infarction. The lady selling vegetables next to me had just finished our training less than a month ago. She felt that the uncle’s carotid artery was not pulsing, and there was no response when calling him. She immediately knelt down and performed chest compressions. The staff of the supermarket next to her took the door The AED came over, and 120 arrived in less than four minutes. Later, the uncle recovered very well and did not even suffer any sequelae. In fact, ordinary people don't have to worry about how to judge whether it is a myocardial infarction or a cerebral infarction. As long as the patient is unresponsive and not breathing normally, he can just start applying pressure. The AED is all voice-guided, and there is no mistake in following the prompts.

Of course, we usually encounter more situations that are not so dangerous but can cause big problems if handled incorrectly, such as the Heimlich treatment of airway foreign body obstruction. A while ago, a mother was playing with her baby in the community, and the child secretly grabbed a peanut and stuffed it into his mouth. Her face turned red from holding it back. She had learned the Heimlich for children from us before. She picked her up and pushed it against her upper abdomen three times before spitting out the peanuts. If she had panicked and just patted her back or reached out to pick it up, she might have pushed the foreign object deeper and delayed the rescue time.

It is also important to deal with common daily trauma, such as stopping bleeding when cutting vegetables, debridement for falls and bruises, cold compress fixation for sports sprains, and temporary braking for suspected fractures. These operations may seem trivial, but they can really save a lot of sins. I met a young man riding an electric bike before. I fell, and my arm hurt so much that I couldn't lift it up. I had to ride a bike to the hospital. Originally, it was just a broken bone, but after 20 minutes of wandering to the hospital, it was already dislocated, and I almost poked the surrounding blood vessels. If I could have found a cardboard or a branch to fix my arm before calling a taxi, it wouldn't have been so serious.

There are also many initial treatments for common emergencies that also fall into the category of basic first aid, such as how to determine if someone faints due to hypoglycemia, heat stroke, or stroke, how to deal with burns and scalds according to the process of "rinsing off the foam cover and sending it away", wound washing and vaccination reminders after being bitten by cats and dogs, oh, by the way, there is also an academic circle here that currently has Controversial points: In the past, many old guidelines said that epileptic seizures should be covered with towels to prevent biting the tongue. Now more and more new studies believe that stuffing things may easily lead to suffocation or tooth damage. The new mainstream guidelines recommend only removing sharp objects around the patient and letting the patient lie on his side to avoid choking on vomit and coughing. There is no need to forcefully break the mouth to stuff things.

Actually, these skills are not as difficult as everyone thinks. Find a formal offline training from the Red Cross Society or an emergency center, and you can master all the commonly used ones in just half a day. When you really encounter an accident, it is much more reliable than searching for ten minutes of popular science.