As a Girlguiding volunteer, I have to get my first aid qualification renewed every three years. It’s a really basic qualification – last time I had to do the full-day training, the answer to almost everything was either “phone the parents” or “phone for an ambulance” or “phone both”. Actually, if you have to get an ambulance for one of your Brownies, phoning the parents isn’t optional. We did our First Aid stage 2 skills builder badge at Brownies this term. There are five cards to complete and four of them covered the whole process from checking a casualty’s responsiveness up to putting them in the recovery position. CPR comes later in the badge’s stages but Wednesday Brownies’ leader brought in Resusci-Charlie and a training defibrillator and we introduced them to it anyway.
One of the things we told them was that even if they’re nor physically strong enough to do CPR, they can now tell someone else what to do in an emergency and explained that a lot of adults have never done first aid and know nothing about how to actually do CPR. I don’t think they really believed us. And that, finally, brings me onto this blog.
I follow a lot of travel types on various social media. They know a lot about flights and luggage and visas and cameras. Less about languages, and those who do are very prone to fairly aggressive screeches of “just learn [language]” as if that’s an easy thing to “just” do. But there seems to be an absolute silence when it comes to first aid and what to do in an emergency.
I know the chances of finding someone having a cardiac arrest are no higher when travelling than when you’re in your own country. I’m not even talking about making sure you’re fully trained in CPR and defib. I’m talking about knowing not to pack those two leftover antibiotics you shouldn’t have left over (and probably shouldn’t have had in the first place) and not then taking them for food poisoning. I’m talking about recognising and knowing what to do about tick bites, knowing how to get treated for a snake bite, how to deal with heat exhaustion and sunstroke, what the local emergency number is. Just the things you need to look after yourself.
To be able to deal with bigger emergencies is always a useful thing to have in your back pocket, though. I once did an informal poll of my office – admittedly a small one where half the staff weren’t around at the time – and discovered that I was the only person with even a basic first aid qualification and that one singular colleague had once done first aid but twenty-odd years ago. We weren’t exaggerating when we told the Brownies they were better qualified now than many adults.
But first aid isn’t about making a makeshift paramedic out of you (and to be clear, the best first aid course in the world won’t do that). One of the first aider’s most important jobs is simply to keep their head and direct the incident. Be the person who sends you for the first aid kit, you for the ambulance, you to take over CPR (don’t worry, I’ll tell you everything you have to do), you to form a wall to protect the victim’s privacy, you to direct the traffic etc. Someone standing there shrieking hysterically is no help. Learn to be the person who’s not shrieking.
In 2019, I was leaving work when a kid ran out into the road and got hit by a car. I dithered over whether it was my job to stop and help until I’d escaped the traffic, parked the car and was running over to help. She was eleven and had bounced over the bonnet, leaving her bruised but miraculously unhurt otherwise. The driver phoned the ambulance, I sat in the road holding her head and chatting – turned out there was no real need to keep her awake by talking, she wasn’t even concussed but I did learn that while she didn’t know what she wanted to do when she grew up, she did know she didn’t want to be a pastry chef. That’s what my first aid training gave me – the ability to step in there, despite my horror of what I might find, and keep calm. As Rudyard Kipling once said: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…”
Even if you never use it in a first aid scenario, getting trained to keep your head is a very useful transferable skill. You’ve missed your plane, had your passport stolen, got lost in the jungle; all very plausible travel problems and all of them would benefit from you not shrieking like a headless chicken but taking the situation calmly and sensibly.
And that is why I think if you can find even a basic four-hour introduction to first aid, you should do it. Learn to help, learn to look after yourself, learn to be calm – it’s a win- win in every possible way.
I Am A Polar Bear 