Children’s safety and first aid experience

First, children’s safety is always more about prevention than first aid. 90% of accidental injuries can be avoided by checking the risks in advance, and there is no need to use first aid skills.； Second, when encountering a situation that requires first aid, the first priority is not to start the operation immediately, but to first confirm the safety of the environment and judge the condition of the injured. Blind rescue may easily cause more serious secondary injuries.

In the slide area of ​​the community in late autumn last year, I was handing out science brochures to parents when I heard an old lady crying. I turned around and saw a 3-year-old boy whose face was purple from holding himself back. Grandma was putting her fingers into his mouth, trying to pull out the stuck jelly. I was just about to run over, but a mother who was playing with her daughter had already rushed up, hugged the child's waist from behind, and used the Heimlich technique to push three times. Half a piece of jelly spurted out with a "pop", and the child cried out, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Later, I talked to the mother. She had gone to the Red Cross to learn first aid. She said that during class, the teacher specifically emphasized that blindly picking at a foreign object stuck in the throat will most likely push the foreign object deeper, which will delay the rescue.

When I first started doing science popularization, I always wanted to teach parents more first aid skills, such as Heimlich, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and hemostatic bandaging. I wished that everyone could become a half-first responder. After seeing many things in the past few years, I realized that I had missed the point. A father spent more than two thousand yuan to learn a complete children's first aid course. The certificate was displayed in the most conspicuous place at home. However, last summer he took his child to play in a country park. While he was squatting on the ground to tie his shoelaces, the child ran to the river and slipped and fell in. Fortunately, the young man camping next to him jumped in and fished the child out. He choked on two mouthfuls of water and was fine. Later, this father came to my popular science class and said that his mind was completely blank at that time. He had forgotten everything he had learned about cardiopulmonary resuscitation and first aid for coughing, and he was left panicking. You see, no matter how good you are in first aid skills, you are still not as good as keeping an eye on your child and not letting him go to dangerous places. I often tell the parents who come to attend the class that child safety protection is like putting a tempered film case on a new mobile phone to prevent it from falling. No matter how expensive the case you buy, it is better to be careful not to drop it on the ground when you usually hold the phone. Wearing a protective film case is not something you can make.

Nowadays, there are various opinions about children's first aid on the Internet. Sometimes, several completely opposite treatment methods can be found for the same situation. The most typical one is children's burns. People of the older generation always say that if you get burned, you should quickly take off your clothes and apply toothpaste and soy sauce. My mother still keeps badger oil in the kitchen drawer at home, which is specially designed to treat burns. However, the current international first aid guide for burns and scalds is to "rinse off the foam and send it with a lid". The first step is to rinse the patient with running cold water at 15-25 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes. You must not apply colored things or apply ointments casually. I used to think that the old experience was all wrong, until I chatted with an emergency pediatrician last time, he said that you can't kill it with a stick. If it is just a small area of ​​shallow burn without broken skin, applying some regular burn ointment or even the old badger seed oil can really relieve the pain. I am afraid that if it is a large area with blisters or even broken skin, if you apply things randomly, it will contaminate the wound. It will be troublesome to go to the hospital for debridement later, and it will easily leave scars. To put it bluntly, all handling methods must be based on the situation and cannot be rigidly adhered to formulas.

Oh, by the way, I went to the kindergarten for a lecture last month. The children talked about the wound treatment methods at home. Some said that if they broke, they should spread Yunnan Baiyao, some said that they should wash it with water, and some said that they should cover it with a band-aid. In fact, these are both correct and incorrect. If it is just a scratch on the skin and some blood oozes, disinfect it with iodophor and leave it to dry. Putting a band-aid on it will make it stuffy and easy to inflame. ； If the wound is deep and bleeding a lot, press it with clean gauze or towel and go to the hospital immediately. Don't sprinkle any powder on the wound, otherwise the doctor will have to scrape off all the powder you sprinkled when cleaning the wound, which will make the child suffer even more.

After so many years of work, I have seen too many parents who cry and say to me, "If I had known, I would have...". In fact, there are not so many who would have known. You don’t need to memorize all the first aid knowledge, and you don’t need to stock up on a box of first aid medicines. Pay more attention to whether the corners of the table at home are wrapped, and whether the hot water bottle is placed out of reach of the children. When you take the children out, you can spend less than two minutes on your mobile phone. This is better than anything else. Don’t panic if something happens. Call 120 first, listen to the doctor’s instructions on the phone, and don’t mess around on your own. Most situations won’t be too bad. After all, what we do is not to turn the tide when an accident occurs, but to prevent the accident from happening at all.