Hugh Reilly: It's a matter of life and death – so get it on the curriculum

Published on Tuesday 10 March 2009 20:52

RECENTLY, I've allowed my pupils to swing on their chairs and indulge in violent horseplay. However, despite my best efforts, there has not been a single accident that would allow me to step forward and say: "Let me through – I'm a first aider… of sorts."

Apparently, it takes high-flying medical undergraduates seven years to learn their profession but, in only one afternoon, I completed a first aid course that transformed me into a potential life-saver.

Oddly – a glaring oversight on her part, methinks – my course tutor did not require me to take the Hippocratic oath, but this fiddly detail did not prevent me acquiring de facto doctor status.

There's an old joke that we doctors bury our mistakes, but luckily mine were on a plastic mannequin with rather attractive thin red lips.

During a CPR simulation, I cupped the dummy's chin with my left hand while pinching her nostrils with my right hand. I unilaterally decided it was a female mannequin as it made my next move – mouth to mouth resuscitation – a tad less sexually unsettling.

Before I could breathe life into the corpse, the tutor unhelpfully pointed out that I had, in fact, closed the mouth and pinched the nostrils, essentially cutting off both airways. I rose above her pedantry and, after about five attempts, the plastic person began to exhale and inhale, albeit with the lung power of an asthmatic with a chest infection.

To be honest, I think I may have forgotten everything I was taught that day. But, like most teachers, I speak with confidence when I say I know what to do in a real school emergency: panic!

Pedagogues are not alone in their ignorance. Less than 7 per cent of the UK population has first aid training, a shocking statistic when one considers that in Germany and Scandinavia, the figure is about 80 per cent. Perhaps our politicians expect us to watch DVDs of Holby City and learn first aid by osmosis.

I'd like to echo calls from the British Red Cross and St John's Ambulance that first aid be part of the curriculum, as it is in Wales, Northern Ireland and many European countries.

When one thinks of the guff given to children during personal and social education lessons, it's an outrage that kids are left in the dark on how to stem blood flow or provide effective help when someone has suffered a heart attack.

Schools can be dangerous places. In the UK, more than 400,000 kids were injured at school last year. Sadly, in 2006, a six-year-old Bradford youngster died at school when she choked on a piece of sausage in the canteen. A dinner lady performed the Heimlich manoeuvre to no avail. It later emerged she had been given no official training; her husband taught her this basic technique.

Teaching first aid is a matter of life and death. A decade or so ago, a small, rotund maths colleague fell off his chair in front of his Higher students. Spontaneous laughter followed, but that quickly turned to screams of horror when he began to resemble a comatose Smurf. His life was saved thanks to an English teacher, a former nurse, arriving quickly on the scene.

Some years ago, I recall talking to a janitor who had inadvertently put his arm through a window. Due to massive blood loss, he was talking gibberish as a first aider staunched the crimson flow until paramedics arrived.

Greater public awareness of first aid may avoid the medical complications arising from the interventions of well meaning idiots. When I were a lad, I broke four fingers and a neighbour used cotton wool balls wrapped inside a bandage to stop blood haemorrhaging from my hand. I cursed that neighbour to the heavens as the nurses at A&E used tweezers to pull strands of cotton from the wounds. For everyone's sake, first aid should be put on the school syllabus.