GCB Health

Archive for October, 2009

Many today are driven to take emergency first aid classes. This often roots in their desire to be helpful in keeping those they care about safe. Thousands of people seek emergency first aid training each month for this very reason. There are so many classes available throughout many communities for this that healthcare professionals often wonder why everyone doesn’t receive emergency first aid training.

Why Emergency First Aid Training?

This training may be the difference between peace of mind and heart break. What do you do if your child winds up with a grave injury? How about if one of your parents just passes out unexpectedly? Emergency First Aid training may bring you closer to making a difference if this were to occur; saving the day.

With more people informed on emergency first aid procedures others may be able to help too. At the same time someone falling and injured in the checkout line at a store might need your help. Emergency first aid training may help you make the best of these undesirable moments.

Whenever in public where many people congregate; emergency first aid training may be needed. This can be at the mall, theater, park, work, bowling alley, etc. Emergency first aid experience can save lives… If you like training on nearly anything you can find; it’s even better yet as emergency first aid classes can bring you many courses to advance your knowledge well.

Where Can You Find Emergency First Aid Training?

Usually the best place to look for emergency first aid training is your local red cross. They have had many safety certification courses for years that are available; among them will be found first aid, CPR, swimming, human care, and many others. If you like learning new things a lot, they are indeed a source to consider.

You will often find emergency first aid training at local community centers. Their focus is making things better throughout the community usually with some focus in the direction of “people helping people”. Often they will have many courses over time of which emergency first aid is likely to be one.

Another great place to find some emergency first aid knowledge would have to be the internet. There are many websites (including this one) that have very useful information on the subject, and many online emergency first aid classes as well. Keep in mind that they don’t offer the hands on environment found in person; however it’s a better foothold than no training at all.

Emergency first aid training should be taken seriously. It not only strengthens your commitment to those you care about, it also gives you a valuable means to help in society at large. If more people did this, it would come back to those you care as well if they are in need and you aren’t present at the time as well.

Everyone should participate in an emergency first aid training program. With the preparation this training will bring, they have yet another view on what their surroundings can bring, as well as how they can positively impact it!

The precaution and proper use of defibrillators is one important chapter, and it is included in the standardized curriculum of the AED basic training course . The American Heart Association, the American Red Cross and the National Safety Council approved and published these precautions for the safety of both the patient and the user of the AED. After the occurrence of the incident you have to look for an AED emergency kit right away.

It is likely that you will find one at the building entrance if you are in a public place or building, because this is the standard place for these kits. Make sure you are familiarized with the contents of the kit. You’ll probably find two pads, a CPR barrier mask, a piece of cloth or a towel, scissors, a pair of gloves and possibly a razor. So go though these automated external defibrillator precautions in order to avoid other accidents from happening.

1. First of all, check the patient for pulse. If you cannot sense the pulse you may proceed, and let the AED determine if there are heartbeats at all. In most of the cases the AED will indicate if there is a pulse and if defibrillation is needed.

2. You might want to try to perform a cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) before taking any further action. But make sure that the AED device is not analyzing the rhythm. This may cause some unpleasant accidents. Many AED devices possess motion and CPR detector, but you won’t have time to determine that in a crisis.

3. The AED device should be used with great care if the patient is in a moving means of transportation. The movement of a vehicle may affect the analysis the AED makes, which won’t be accurate and consequently it will perform incorrect tasks.

However, if employed while transporting the patient to hospital, stop and take the pulse several times and do monitoring checks with the help of the AED. Some AED models are smart enough to distinguish between external movement and cardiac movement.

4. Beware of water!

Before performing the defibrillation, make sure the chest of the patient is completely dry. In the AED kit you will find a piece of cloth or a towel that is set there exactly with the purpose of drying the patient’s chest. Sweat or water spots make certain parts of the chest be less resistant and the defibrillation might not be very effective. Besides, the presence of water may lead to local burns. Also make sure that the patient has no contact with water. It the patient is in a pool or outside, in wet weather, take the patient under a safe shelter and dry the chest before taking any further action.

However, do not use alcohol to dry the chest of the patient. As you may probably know, alcohol is very flammable.

5. Take a close look at the patient’s chest. It should be free of nitroglycerine patches or any other patches or materials. Get rid of any patches before performing the defibrillation. The nitroglycerine patches may cause explosion when in contact with the AED pads.

6. Make sure the patient does not lie on a conductive surface like sheet metal or metal bleachers. These conductors may transmit the shock to other people that are in the patient’s neighborhood.

7. Keep your hands off the patient while performing the defibrillation.

Also make sure no-one else touches the patient. If these rules are not respected, you or others might get the electric shock. Touching the patient while the AED performs the analysis will not give accurate results.

8. An AED should not be used on children under the age of 8, or under 55 pounds.

Some AEDs are not able to adjust to the low-energy settings that are required for children. Anyway, there are several AED devices on the market that may resuscitate even children under 8. So check the packaging of the device before using it.

9. Take a look at the environment where you will perform the resuscitation!

You shouldn’t perform a defibrillation if you are among flammable supplies such as gasoline or free-flowing oxygen. Also, the AED should be used with prudence when there is strong electromagnetic interference (EMI). The AED might detect false cardiac rhythm when there is electromagnetic interference.

10. Careful with the cell phones and portable radios- the waves cause trouble!

It is highly important to notify an ambulance of the incident and the cell phone is the most effective device, but make sure you keep all cell phones at least 6 feet away from the patient and the AED. The cell phone may influence the analysis. Radios have the same effect on the AED, so keep all radios away.

A CALL for substantial and sustained support for research to guide evidence-based policies and development of new malaria tools, to save countless lives, sign-posted the world’s largest malaria conference, which opened in Nairobi, Kenya, yesterday.

And pneumonia, one of the biggest causes of child death in the world, will by 2011 be controllable with the use of a Pneumonia Conjugate Vaccine (PVC) scheduled to be available for routine immunisation of children below five years.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) will also invest $39 billion to tackle the disease.

The vaccine, being developed to reduce the incidences of newborn and child mortality, is to help in the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 4.

The 5th Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (MIM) Pan-African Conference brings together 2,000 researchers, health workers, public health officials, policy-makers and activists from across Africa and the world.

According to a Pan-African News Agency (PANA) report, Kenya’s Vice President, Kalonzo Musyoka, opened the conference, the first to be held in four years. It will highlight the latest research in malaria prevention and treatment.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Building knowledge for action”, but the key question for malaria is which knowledge for which action?” said Dr. Adrian Luty, Senior Researcher at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, The Netherlands, and Chairman of the MIM conference Scientific Committee.

“If we as a global community are to be ready to achieve eradication, we must invest in the science that can guide these efforts and provide the tools and methods that will make success possible,” Luty said.

Although preventable and treatable, malaria continues to be one of the world’s most deadly and persistent diseases.

Ninety per cent of all malaria deaths occur in Africa, and 85 per cent of these deaths are among children under the age of five.

Since the last MIM conference in 2005, the global community has made tremendous strides against the disease, the conference organisers said.

But they noted that despite this progress, many African countries are struggling to meet Millennium Development Goal 6, which aims ‘to halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria,’ and are unlikely to meet the WHO target to halve malaria mortality by 2010.

One of the key goals of MIM is to strengthen African research capacity to guide policies for malaria control and to develop new tools for prevention and treatment.

Research conducted in Africa has helped guide new practices, for example, in Rwanda, where just five years ago malaria was the leading cause of death.

A multi-faceted approach using long-lasting insecticide treated nets (LLINs) and training for community health workers has decreased the malaria death rate by 60 per cent in just two years.

In Zanzibar, a mass distribution of LLINs in early 2006 and insecticide spraying programmes triggered a 95 per cent reduction in malaria infections for children less than two years of age.

“Over the past four years, new strategies coupled with unprecedented global attention and support from endemic country governments have increased access to malaria treatment and prevention for some of the world’s most vulnerable communities,” said Dr. Francine Ntoumi, MIM Secretariat Co-ordinator at the African Malaria Network Trust (AMANET), which has hosted the MIM secretariat for the past four years as the organisation’s first African secretariat.

“However, we must continue to build a critical mass of scientists working on malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, so that countries with the greatest burden are themselves setting the research agenda,” she said.

Due to continued cost and availability challenges, those most at-risk of malaria often have limited access to proven prevention tools, such as insecticide-treated nets and access to the current gold-standard drug, artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs).

As a result, the disease disproportionately affects poor rural communities in malaria-endemic countries.

In Nigeria, the Minister of State for Health, Dr. Aliyu Idi Hong, at the World Pneumonia Day celebration yesterday in Abuja, stated that although “the vaccine is not in the market all over the world as we speak, it is still under production, but I’m confident that it will be available by then (2011)”.

The first of its kind, the celebration with the theme, “Prevent, Protect and Treat,” is aimed at drawing attention to the disease as a public health concern and increase awareness on its prevention and control.

Pneumonia is the second killer disease of children under five in Nigeria after malaria, with about six million new cases yearly. It kills about 200,000 children in Nigeria and two million globally.

A joint press statement by the WHO and UNICEF spoke of a strategy called the Global Action Plan for the prevention and control of Pneumonia (GAPP), which aims to save up to 3.5 million children from dying by 2015.

According to the two bodies, the cost of implementing the GAPP by scaling up the recommended measures in the 68 high burden countries is estimated at $39 billion between 2010 and 2015. The cost is expected to rise over the six-year period from a yearly need of $3.8 billion in 2010 to $8.0 billion in 2015.

The Director-General of WHO, Dr. Margaret Chan, said: “This action plan provides the strategy to prevent and control pneumonia, which today kills more children than any other illness” and that “we know the strategy will work, and if it is applied in every high burden country, we will be able to prevent millions of deaths.”

UNICEF’s Executive Director, Ann Veneman, who also stated that the disease, a leading cause of death of over 4,000 children daily, added: “Effective interventions to reduce deaths caused by pneumonia must be used more widely and made more readily available for children at risk.”

Caused by a bacterial, viral or fungus infection, prevention of the disease was identified as a key to solving the problem through exclusive breastfeeding, proper nutrition for older children, reduction of indoor air pollution from tobacco and stove smoke as well as improvement of pre-natal care to reduce incidences of low birth weight.

To this end, however, other underlying diseases like measles and diarrhea should also be prevented from gaining grounds among children.