First Aid: Advantages and Limitations of First Aid Training

First aid training is essential to get for every individual. It helps you to become able to handle emergencies more professionally. You become able to handle minor situations like cuts and burns to major ones like head injuries or cardiac arrest.

What is First Aid?

The first or immediate assistance and care provided to the individual suffering from any injury or illness is known as first aid. It helps to preserve life, promotes recovery, relieves pain, and makes you able to calm the victim until the arrival of an ambulance or professional medical help. 

Importance of First Aid Training

Accidents or emergencies can happen anytime, anywhere, and with anyone. One should always be prepared to face and handle such situations. This is only possible with first aid training that makes you able to handle emergencies professionally. The main objective of first aid is to help people able to recognize potential risks and dangers and act accordingly. 

Pros of First Aid Training

• Immediate Assistance in Emergencies

The first few minutes are often the most crucial whenever an emergency occurs. There are many health emergencies as well that require assistance immediately to save the patient’s life. First aid training is a type of assistance that can be given within minutes after the emergency happens. Having first-aid-trained people around ensures that there is someone present who can handle the situation professionally. This immediate assistance can help increase the chances of survival and prevent the situation from worsening. 

• Confidence and Preparedness

When you get first aid training in Norwich, it helps you in more than ways you can imagine. It not only makes you able to handle emergencies but also helps to cultivate and boost your confidence and preparedness skills. You become able to handle adversities without hesitation when you learn the skills and techniques of first aid. The first aid not only gives you the confidence to handle adverse situations, but you also become a good communicator who can help calm people in difficult times. 

• Potential to Save Lives

No one can deny the importance of first aid training in saving lives. The major goal is to stabilize and handle the condition of the victim until the arrival of medical assistance. However, this can lead to a life-and-death situation if this immediate care is not given properly. Therefore, getting and implementing first aid training properly plays a vital role in saving lives. If you are trained, you can make a difference by saving someone’s life.   

• Promoting Safety Awareness

When you get first aid training, you fill yourself up with lots of information necessary to help you and the people around you in case of any accident or health emergency. This training equips you with the ability to assess potential hazards and take preventive measures to avoid accidents. This means you possess the knowledge about how to be safe and make others safe as well. This helps to enhance the level of safety awareness in you and you can help people to assess risks as well. 

Cons of First Aid Training

• Limited Scope of Training

First aid training is surely a blessing but it has some limitations as well. One of the major drawbacks of first aid training is that its scope is limited. This training teaches you to handle situations but only at a primary level and until the arrival of medical help. This means you cannot handle every kind of situation rather you can just provide immediate care or help. This limits the level of help provided to the victim and so does the scope of first aid training. 

• Risk of Misapplication

First aid training teaches how to calm down and relax the victim. However, there are cases where first aid did more harm than benefit when not performed correctly. For example, if you are handling a victim of a dislocated shoulder and you have to place the shoulder back in its place. This is a very sensitive matter and needs proper knowledge and training. You can become the cause of increasing the pain and suffering of the victim if you are not properly trained to handle such injuries. 

• Maintenance of Skills Over Time

Another big disadvantage of first aid training is that many people are unable to maintain the skills over time. With time, people tend to forget the basics of the training and this leads to many unforeseen circumstances. It is obvious that you do not remain in practice after some time of getting trained, and this is possible that you forget many major techniques and skills of first aid. 

• Legal and Ethical Considerations

Another downside of first aid training is the long list of ethical and legal considerations. For example, according to the rule, you have to first obtain the victim’s consent before applying any first aid on him and that consent should be verbal. Now what will you do in situations, where the victim is not in a state of giving verbal consent? This and many such questions arise from the legal and ethical considerations of first aid due to which many people avoid providing help even after having the much-needed knowledge. 

Conclusion

First aid is no doubt a very important and helping procedure and knowledge that can help save lives and promote recovery, etc. However, there are some downsides to the training as well that cannot be overlooked and should be taken into consideration before implementing any such procedure.