First aid is the assistance given to a person as soon as injury or illness takes place until professional treatment can be given. First aid is made up of techniques that a person trained in basic first aid can administer, using the rudimentary equipment that is available in a first aid kit.
How First Aid Makes a Difference
The importance of knowing first aid cannot be emphasized enough. Here is how knowing first aid techniques can help:
Providing Help During Emergencies
There are many emergency situations where waiting for medical help may not be an option. Say someone has ingested something dangerous, is having a heart attack, or a natural disaster has struck, then if you know first aid, you can save someone’s life.
Ensuring the Right Methods of Treatment are Administered
While you may want to help someone, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you could end up making things worse. When you have been trained in first aid, you know what you are doing, and that can mean the difference between life and death in an emergency situation.
First Aid Helps You Too
If you are injured or ill, then your knowledge of first aid can help you too.
Who Needs to Know First Aid?
The short answer is – everybody. However, that is an ideal situation. More realistically there are some people who absolutely must know first aid. Here is a list:
- Those Who Deal with Children
People who deal with children – either as parents, educators or as minders (nannies and daycare professionals) – must know first aid.
- Lifeguards
Those who watch over the safety of swimmers should also know how to perform first aid.
- Law Enforcement
People in law enforcement may need to carry out emergency first aid to save lives.
- First Aiders in Organizations
Every business needs to select a few people who know who to carry out first aid. Those working in high-risk jobs will need to know more than basic first aid, and so the organization needs to ensure that they have a set of appropriately trained first aiders who know how to handle the more severe injuries that are a constant risk in high-risk jobs.
A Few Facts about First Aid
Here are a few facts about first aid:
- There are many people who want to help a person in distress. However, their lack of knowledge of what to do makes them afraid and they end up freezing into inaction.
- The first step in learning first aid is the desire to help.
- Where there are a lot of places where there is immediate access to professional medical help, there are many more where help cannot arrive on time. That is when first aid can make a difference.
- First aid will help you recognize symptoms of danger. For example, you will be able to tell when person who is diabetic is getting hyperglycemic (when the blood sugar levels drop to dangerously low levels) and can take simple steps to help save their life.
