First
Aid
Normal night at scouts, or so we thought.... We never really do much first aid, so it’s
always nice to have a quick brush up on our skills. And for those who hadn’t
covered it before; I hope it was worthwhile for them. We focused on three main
topics: CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) (long words) Hypothermia
(particularly useful for us) and Choking.
For CPR, we used specialised cardiopulmonary
resuscitation dolls (try saying that 3 times fast) only called “Annie”. 30 compressions
and 2 rescue breaths, sounds easy doesn’t it? That’s where you’re wrong. Even
the strongest members of the troop found it hard going, and that’s really
saying something. It’s all worth it though, this 15 minute session provided
with all the knowledge needed to possibly save someone’s life.,
Hypothermia, probably the easiest to understand of
the three, it’s what you might expect you would do to treat it. Hot liquids,
blankets, other people, hot water bottles, exercise; the list of things to
treat hypothermia could go much further. So if you were to choose which one
you’d most likely want to experience over the others; hypothermia’s the one for
you.
Choking is something we’ve all had experiences of and
never really given it much thought. But its one of the biggest killers in the
modern world... Did you know that 1 in 10 household deaths is due to choking?
We certainly didn’t... but we do now,
otherwise I wouldn’t have just told you. It’s because of our lack of knowledge
towards choking that makes it such a huge problem. One story we were told was
about a young girl who suddenly started coughing during her school lunch, she
couldn’t tell her teachers what was happening, but it wouldn’t have mattered
because none of them had done any training for it! And by the time the medical
services had arrived, the girl was already dead...
All in all, we all learnt a lot from this experience
and came out more educated people than when we went in...
