Child Safety and First Aid Yin Ke

Yin Ke is one of the first front-line practitioners in China to bring pre-hospital first aid from professional medical care scenarios to ordinary families, making local adaptations and transformations for common accidental injuries of children aged 0-12 years old. All the first aid methods he exports are 100% in line with the core requirements of the National Health Commission's "Children's Injury Prevention and First Aid Guidelines". There is no self-made wild way, and 80% of the content can be mastered by ordinary parents after practicing it 2-3 times. It is really useful and courageous to use when encountering difficulties.

I met him in person at a community first aid class in Gongshu District, Hangzhou last fall. He was not the kind of lecturer who wears a suit and tie and reads to a PPT. He wears a navy blue first aid suit that has been washed white, and his trouser legs are still stained with yellow mud from a lecture in Lishui Mountain last week. He speaks with a Shandong accent, and he squats down to use props to demonstrate while talking. There is no airs at all.

In fact, there has been controversy in the current children's science circle about the standards for family first aid. On one side are the "standardists" who have professional medical backgrounds. They believe that parents must fully master the same operating procedures as professional first aiders, and even if they are not good enough, they will easily cause secondary injuries.； On the other side are the "family adaptionists" represented by Yin Ke. They feel that ordinary parents are not professionals. When things happen, their hands are so shaky that they can't even hold a pen. Standards that are too complicated cannot be implemented at all. It is better to simplify the operation to the point where "as long as you do it, you will do better than nothing."

A pediatrician previously publicly questioned his "non-standard" Heimlich teaching in Xiaohongshu: The profession requires parents to stand behind their children, lunge to fix the child's lower body, and use rock-paper-scissors gestures exactly the same. However, Yin Ke's class teaches the elderly that if they cannot hold a baby over 3 years old, they can do it while sitting on a chair with the baby on their lap. Even if the child is unstable, parents can kneel behind the child and exert force, as long as the point of force is two fingers above the navel.

Yin Ke didn't scold him back at that time, and directly released his own community tracking data for three years: among the more than 1,200 families he taught offline, 17 families actually encountered emergencies of children choking, and all were successfully rescued. Only one case broke a little skin on the child's abdomen because the parent was too hasty and exerted too much force, and there was no rib fracture. In turn, he posted survey data from a certain platform’s professional standard first aid course: only 17% of the students’ operational compliance rate after 3 months of learning. Most of them had long forgotten the details of their stance and gestures. If something happened, they would not dare to take action at all. They could only hold their babies and cry while waiting. 120

My best friend Xiaowen is one of those 17 households. Last winter, she took her 2-year-old son to Yin Ke’s offline get out of class. During the recess, the child stole other children’s jelly and ate it. He choked after taking a bite and his face turned red from holding it in. Xiaowen Wen had just finished learning the Heimlich in less than 10 minutes, but she still remembered the lunge position. She sat directly on the chair and put the baby on her legs. She found the right position and pushed it twice as taught by Yin Ke. The jelly spurted out in less than 10 seconds. Later, Xiaowen said that if she had to remember the standard movements to find the posture, it might really delay things.

He had been in the emergency department of a tertiary hospital for 8 years and had seen too many tragedies that could have been completely avoided. The core was not that the parents were unloving, but that they simply did not know what to do, or even did something wrong. For example, when many parents see that their children have dropped their heads, their first reaction is to pick them up and run to the hospital. Every time he gives a lecture, he emphasizes repeatedly: As long as the children are not unconscious after the fall, do not have projectile vomiting, and can answer questions normally, they should lie quietly and observe for 15 minutes before moving. Picking and shaking the child will easily cause secondary injuries to the cervical spine and brain, and may cause an accident even if everything is fine. There is also the old recipe of applying toothpaste and soy sauce to burns. Every time he goes to class, he brings a model of infection scars after superficial second-degree burns. It was a 4-year-old girl he met when he was just doing science popularization. She knocked over the kettle, and her grandmother quickly applied half a bottle of soy sauce. In the end, the infection left scars. Originally, she could rinse it with running cold water for 15 minutes according to the regulations, and there would be no scars at all.

Of course, his content is not omnipotent. He himself said in the first sentence of every class: What I am talking about are common accidents that 80% of families will encounter with a high probability - choking, falls, burns, accidental ingestion, electric shocks, etc. If your child has special basic diseases such as epilepsy and congenital heart disease, don't rely on my popular science. You must consult the attending doctor to learn a targeted first aid plan. I have not been exposed to the specific situation of your child, so what I can say is inaccurate.

At the end of the last class, he handed out a palm-sized hard card to every parent who came. The five most commonly used first aid steps were printed on the front. The words were printed in large letters so that people with presbyopia could see them clearly. On the back was the local children's emergency hotline. He said, "Don't save it in the photo album of your phone, stick it on the refrigerator door. If something happens, your hands will shake so much that you can't even unlock it. It's only useful if you can look up and see it." All of his short video popular science videos are distributed for free, and he has never offered any 999 paid courses. According to his words, "If I sell the course for several hundred dollars, the elderly in the mountainous areas will not be able to hear it, and the babies who could have been saved cannot be saved, so I might as well not teach it."