What are the basic first aid skills?

The basic first aid skills we talk about every day are actually based on the core principle of "saving lives first, then reducing injuries", covering cardiac and respiratory arrest treatment, foreign body obstruction first aid, trauma treatment, and environmental damage response. It is not just as simple as the cardiopulmonary resuscitation that everyone often hears.

I have been doing community first aid training for almost three years, and I have met too many people who think that first aid is a medical matter, and it is useless to learn it on their own. When things happen, they panic and do nothing to help. Last week, I met a high school student who sprained his ankle while playing basketball. His teammates rubbed it and put a blood-activating plaster on him. The next day, he was so swollen that he couldn’t put on his shoes and asked me what to do. This is a typical example of someone who doesn’t even have the most basic knowledge about how to deal with sports injuries.

The most commonly heard cardiopulmonary resuscitation + AED use is indeed the highest priority among all basic first aids. After all, the golden rescue window for cardiac arrest is only 4 minutes, and it will most likely be too late to wait until 120. Last year, a 30-year-old programmer in the business district of our jurisdiction suffered a heart attack while working overtime. The girl from the milk tea shop next to her had just learned first aid from us last month. She went up to the hospital and applied chest compressions for less than 3 minutes. The security guard fetched an AED. Except once, the person was already awake when he arrived at the hospital. This is the difference between knowing and not knowing. There is also the Heimlich maneuver for airway foreign body obstruction, which is also a skill that can save lives instantly. Whether it is an old man who got stuck in a steamed bun while eating, or a child who swallowed a button while playing, the foreign body can be expelled in a few seconds using the hand technique. When I was helping in the emergency department, I encountered this problem overnight. I had three children with stuck foreign bodies. One mother used Heimlich at home. When they arrived at the hospital, the children were already alive and kicking. The other two had purple lips when they came. The doctor used a laryngoscope for a long time to remove them. The parents were crying and shaking.

The rest is the treatment of trauma that we encounter more often in our daily life. It is not just as simple as wrapping gauze. Compression and hemostasis of arterial bleeding, temporary fixation of fractures, "rinsing off bubble caps" for burns and scalds, wound washing and vaccination reminders after scratches and bites by cats and dogs, and even the treatment of small injuries such as sprained feet and sprained waists are all included in the scope of basic first aid. There was an uncle who cut his wrist with a sickle while doing farm work. He found a hemp rope and tied his entire upper arm tightly. He tied it up for two hours before coming to the hospital. When he came, the distal end of his wrist was so cold that he almost had to have his limb amputated. In fact, if he had known that he only needed to firmly hold down the bleeding wound and did not need to tie the entire arm tightly, he would never have suffered this fate.

There are also the treatment of accidental injuries caused by environments such as heat stroke, frostbite, drowning, and electric shock, which also belong to the content of basic first aid. Of course, there are still many controversial points in this area. For example, whether to control the water in drowning, which was very noisy in the past, is now not recommended by mainstream guidelines. However, the old experience in many places still does this, and whether sprains can be treated. Immediately spray a red bottle of Yunnan Baiyao. Different training systems have different opinions. In fact, ordinary people like us don’t need to worry about these controversial points. Remember the general principles and you will not go wrong: if you get an electric shock, cut off the power before touching others, move to a cool place to cool down before suffering from heat stroke, and check if you are breathing first when you are rescued from drowning. If you are not sure, don’t operate blindly. It is better to call 120 first and wait than to help indiscriminately.

Anyway, you don’t need to get perfect marks to learn basic first aid. If you really don’t panic when something happens, and you can do the most critical steps correctly, it will be better than anything else.