What does the relationship between first aid and emergency health include

Essentially, first aid is the front-end execution port of the emergency health system and the most critical contact point for the implementation of emergency health value. The two are a symbiotic relationship of "plan-implementation" and "prevention-treatment" covering the entire chain.

We all have experience in grassroots emergency health work. Half of the emergency health education we usually do in communities is related to first aid, such as the FAST identification method for myocardial infarction, the Heimlich maneuver for foreign objects stuck in the throat, and the principle of rinsing and delivering bubble caps after burns. It may seem like teaching first aid skills, but in fact, it is to install the pre-prevention port of emergency health directly at the doorstep of residents. Last year, a security guard in an old community in our jurisdiction had just participated in the free first aid training organized by the street last month. He turned around and saw the owner's child having a date stuck in his throat. He used a Heimlich to take out the foreign object in less than half a minute. If he had to wait for 120 to arrive, it would have taken seven or eight minutes at least. The child might have suffered a brain injury. This is how first aid turned a paper emergency health plan into a real life rescue.

Don’t think that this is only true for small daily accidents. It is even more obvious when encountering large-scale public emergencies. When there was a heavy rain on July 20 in Zhengzhou two years ago, many of the private emergency response team members who went in to provide support held first aid certificates. When they encountered trapped people with trauma, drowning, or even patients with chronic diseases who had stopped taking medicine, they were able to provide basic treatment first, which just filled the gap before the arrival of professional public health teams. To put it bluntly, these on-site first aid actions are the extended reach of the emergency health system in emergency scenarios.

We usually conduct emergency health risk assessments in the jurisdiction. First aid resource reserves are a must-check hard indicator. The density of AED deployment in business districts, subway entrances, and schools, the proportion of people in the jurisdiction who hold Red Cross first aid certificates, and even whether the emergency transfer channels of community health service centers are accessible. These data directly determine the emergency health protection level of the entire region. For example, during our inspection last year, we discovered that in a newly opened large-scale business district, there was only an AED at the service desk on the first floor among three floors, and no one in the property knew how to use it. We issued a rectification notice on the spot. If someone had a cardiac arrest while shopping on the top floor, and waited for the staff to run downstairs to get the AED, the golden 4 minutes would have passed long ago. No matter how thorough the emergency health plan was, it would be useless.

Now the industry actually has different views on the boundary between the two. Some experts in the field of public health believe that first aid itself is too professional, and the general public without systematic training can easily mishandle it and cause secondary injuries. The emergency health system only needs to do a good job in dispatching and connecting professional first aid forces, without spending too much effort. To popularize science for ordinary people; but most of us who implement it prefer another point of view. Now that the density of people in cities is so high, there are always gaps that professional forces cannot cover. Incorporating public first aid capabilities into the emergency health system, even if only one out of a hundred passersby knows how to operate an AED correctly, many more patients with cardiac arrest can be saved every year. We are also trying to find a balance when doing science popularization. We not only teach everyone the standardized operating steps, but also repeatedly emphasize that giving priority to calling 120 and not blindly moving the injured in uncertain situations to avoid doing bad things with good intentions.

To put it bluntly, emergency health is like a health protection net woven for the entire city, and first aid is the top knots of this net. When there is a real risk of falling, these knots will be the first to catch people. If these knots are loose and weak, no matter how dense the entire net is, it will not be able to prevent accidents.