Summary of experience in preschool children’s safety and first aid training

This is not a skill class that can be completed by just learning a few first-aid actions. The essence is to help our front-line preschool teachers and parents transform the past passive thinking of "repairing if something goes wrong" into a three-dimensional safety net of "checking for hidden dangers beforehand, standardizing handling during the incident, and scientifically sending medical treatment afterwards." The current controversy in the industry about the popularity of first-aid skills and training standards also shows that there is far from a unified answer to the implementation of preschool safety, and it must be combined with the actual situation of kindergartens and families.

Speaking of which, I was a little resistant to this type of training before. I always felt that it was just a formality and just memorizing a few knowledge points to cope with the assessment. Until the first class of this training, the teacher showed a real case from a kindergarten in our district last year: a middle class child secretly carried a child in his pocket during lunch break. The button candy got stuck in the air intake and his face was bruised from holding it in. The teacher in charge was so panicked that he could only pat his back. Within 3 minutes of waiting for the health doctor to come over, the child had suffered a brief loss of consciousness. Although he was finally rescued, he stayed in the hospital for a week, and the parents and the kindergarten were responsible for almost two months. My back immediately felt numb after reading it. This kind of thing is really too close to us, and it is not an unreachable story in the news.

Don't tell me, I thought I knew the Heimlich maneuver a long time ago. I've watched the short video 800 times. But when I started practicing it, I learned that babies under 1 year old need to be held on the arms, patted on the back and compressed the chest. Only babies over 1 year old can stand behind and punch the upper abdomen. It must be controlled to the extent that "the child can be lifted up a little without hurting the ribs." The general teaching videos on the Internet did not explain it in such detail at all. If you really use that vague technique to operate on a baby, the ribs may be broken. And to deal with nosebleeds, I have always taught my children to raise their heads. During the training, I learned that raising their heads will cause blood to flow into the stomach and even the trachea. The correct way is to lean forward and press the sides of the nose with your fingers for 5 to 10 minutes. Just a little knowledge like this, I was wrong for five or six years.

At this point, I have to mention a very controversial disagreement in the industry: One group of experts insists that first aid is a professional medical skill. Ordinary teachers do not have a medical background and cannot learn solidly through just a few hours of training. If they make operational mistakes, they will be held responsible. Therefore, as long as every kindergarten has a health doctor with a first aid certificate, it will be enough. Ordinary teachers only need to learn to detect hidden dangers and call for help as soon as possible.； But another school of thought is that the golden first aid time for airway foreign body obstruction is only 4 minutes. In many cases, the health care doctor is not on site. By the time you call someone or call 120, you will be delayed. Therefore, all teachers leading the class must master basic first aid skills and must be certified to work. I actually prefer the latter. Last month, a child in our kindergarten swallowed half a raisin and got stuck in his throat while eating snacks. At that time, the health care doctor was collecting supplies in the park next door. I had just practiced at the training the day before. At that time, I held the child and pressed it three times and the raisin spurted out. If I had waited for the 5 minutes for the health care doctor to arrive, something might have happened.

This training also broke many of my deep-rooted misconceptions. I always thought that applying some toothpaste and soy sauce would reduce swelling and pain when I was burned or scalded. As a result, the teacher showed us a case: my grandma smeared a hand full of sauce on her grandson who accidentally knocked over the hot water bowl. Oil, when it was sent to the hospital, the pigment of the soy sauce seeped into the wound. When the doctor cleaned it, the child cried heartbrokenly, and a scar was left in the end. The correct way is actually to "rinse off the bubble cap and send it away." First, rinse with cold water for 15 minutes, and don't apply anything else randomly. There is also anti-drowning. I used to think that only rivers and swimming pools need to be protected, but training data shows that 32% of drowning incidents among children aged 1-4 years old in my country every year occur at home. Buckets, fish tanks, and even bathtubs filled with half a tank of water can all be used. When I heard what happened, my back felt cold. There was a child in our class who ran to the bathroom to touch the half-full sink while I was turning my head to tie the shoelaces of other children. Fortunately, the childcare teacher pulled her away quickly. Now I am scared to think about it.

There is another controversial point: Should parents also receive mandatory safety and first aid training? Some people say that the responsibility of the kindergarten is to take care of things in the kindergarten. It is not our responsibility to improve parents’ safety awareness. ； But some people say that data shows that 70% of accidental injuries to preschool children occur outside kindergarten. No matter how well our teachers are trained, if parents don’t understand anything at home, it means that most of the safety net is missing. I now set aside 10 minutes in every parent-teacher meeting to talk about a simple first aid knowledge point. Last time I talked about the correct Heimlich technique for young children. A week later, a parent sent me a WeChat message saying that his child had eaten a peanut card at home. He pressed it twice according to the method I taught and it came out. He almost cried at that time. He listened to those 10 minutes before saying that it was okay.

In fact, now I don’t think it is necessary for every teacher and every parent to become a professional first aid provider. After all, if you really encounter a serious accident, you still have to rely on doctors. But the biggest gain after participating in these rounds of training is that you don’t panic when things happen, you know what is right and what you absolutely cannot do, and you can give your children a little more safety in those most critical minutes. To put it bluntly, when we are in preschool, we study more and memorize more, just to block one more possible risk for the little ones in our hands.