Experience in open classes on children’s safety and first aid

After attending this 3-hour open class on children's safety and first aid, my biggest gain was not that I had memorized the Heimlich maneuver and the standard procedures for treating burns and scalds, but that I had completely reversed the previous misconception that "first aid means rescuing people in an accident according to procedures." The core of children's safety is "prevention first and flexible treatment." All standardized first aid guidelines must be adjusted based on the actual situation on site, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

To be honest, I always thought that this kind of open class was just a formality. After all, I have watched the short video of Heimlich's movements 800 times, and I have bought a lot of safety corners and socket plugs at home. What else is there to learn? As a result, the first case at the beginning left me completely confused: last year, a local 3-year-old boy got stuck in his throat after eating jelly. His grandmother followed the Heimlich maneuver she learned online and applied seven or eight strong pressures. Originally, the boy could still cry out and it was a partial obstruction, but the result was that the jelly pieces were pushed into the deep airway. When he was sent to the hospital, he had been deprived of oxygen for too long and could not be saved.

When talking about the treatment of foreign body obstruction in the airway, the two lecturers at the scene even argued. Dr. Li from the emergency department of the Children's Hospital said that as long as the baby can still make sounds and cough forcefully, he must not pat his back or do Heimlich. It is safest to give priority to encouraging independent coughing. External intervention may easily cause secondary injuries.； However, Teacher Zhang, who has been doing popular science on child safety in the community for 10 years, has a different opinion. She mentioned that most ordinary parents simply cannot tell the difference between "partial obstruction" and "complete obstruction". It is easy to panic and dare not do anything. Therefore, when popularizing science, it is still necessary to teach Heimlich's standard movements in place. Even if it is "overcorrected", it is better than parents watching their children suffocate. In fact, what they both said is reasonable. In the end, they came to a compromise conclusion: the first reaction of ordinary parents is to check whether the baby can speak. If he can speak, he will stay with him and let him cough. If he cannot speak, if his face turns purple, he will immediately seek first aid.

I just experienced a similar scary moment last week. My child was eating pistachios while smiling and talking, and suddenly he choked and coughed to the point of tears. Before that, I had reached out to pick it out in his mouth or patted him on the back. After class that day, I knelt down and asked him, "Can you talk to mommy?" ”, he said "yes" with tears in his eyes, but I didn't dare to move. I squatted beside him and coughed with him for half a minute. I coughed out the chopped nuts. Now I'm scared to think about it. If I had done it blindly, something might have happened.

Oh, by the way, I have stocked up on dozens of those soft silicone adhesive safety corners before. I thought that if I covered all the table corners, everything would be fine. However, the teacher did a small test on the spot, using a 10-pound sandbag to simulate the force of a 1.2-meter-tall child running over and hitting it. That kind of adhesive The safety corner of the model flew out with a "pop". The teacher said that every year, the emergency department receives babies who get stuck in their mouths after stuffing the fallen safety corner into their mouths. The day I got home, I took off all the edges that were not firmly adhered and replaced them with embedded bumper strips. Although they are ugly, they won't fall off.

Speaking of which, there was an interesting episode. A father raised his hand and asked, "If I have blocked all the sockets in the house and put away all sharp objects, will there be no safety issues?" The teacher asked him on the spot: "Can you block the sockets in the shopping mall? Can the sharp edges of the community play area be smoothed? ” I suddenly realized at that time that our protection is never to create a sterile safety cover for the baby, but to teach him to identify risks. After I got home, I stopped repeating "This can't be touched and that can't be touched." Instead, I played a "find the danger" game with my baby for half an hour, letting him point out by himself what things in the house might get stuck, burned, or dropped. The sockets and hot water kettles he found by himself were better remembered than I could remember by repeating them a hundred times.

I have dealt with burns and scalds before. Last time my baby’s fingers were burned red by the heater, and my mother told me to apply toothpaste. I thought there was nothing wrong at the time. In this class, the doctor specifically said that the five-character formula of “rinse off the blisters and send them away” is not a rigid rule: only first-degree burns that are slightly red and have no blisters need to be rinsed with running cold water for 20 minutes.； If it has blistered or even peeled off, don't wash it casually. If there are bacteria in the water and it may cause infection, cover the wound loosely with a sterile dressing or clean plastic wrap and send it to the hospital immediately. As for the folklore of applying toothpaste, soy sauce, and badger oil, doctors don't kill it with a stick. They say that for very slight redness, it will be no problem to use scald ointment and badger ointment produced by regular pharmaceutical companies. If there is already a wound, applying these will not only increase the risk of infection and cause trouble for the doctor to clean the wound, but it is useless.

After class, I didn’t post the first aid manual I was given on the refrigerator. Instead, I moved all the whole jelly and unopened large nuts at home to a wall cabinet out of my child’s reach. To be honest, how can raising a baby be 100% safe? It’s just that if you understand more and pay more attention, you can avoid unnecessary risks for your children.