What is the relationship between first aid and emergency health?

To put it simply, first aid is the “first line of defense” that is at the forefront of the emergency health system and is most accessible to the public. The two are subordinate and complementary relationships between point and area, immediate treatment, and full-chain prevention and control. They are completely different, but they are inseparable at all.

I encountered a real incident two months ago when I was stationed at a street emergency health education point. Uncle Zhang in the community suffered a cerebral infarction while playing chess. The old man next to me happened to have participated in the charity first aid class we held last month. He immediately recognized the symptoms of crooked mouth and unable to lift one arm, so I didn't dare to feed him randomly. I carried the antihypertensive medicine with me and quickly turned the patient sideways to prevent the vomit from choking into the trachea. At the same time, I called 120 and was sent to the hospital just in the 4.5-hour golden window of intravenous thrombolysis. Now I have recovered enough to go downstairs and walk by myself. The attending doctor said that the correct treatment in the early stage of the disease helped a lot.

When many people first come into contact with the concept of emergency health, they always think that they just need to learn first aid and practice CPR. In fact, this narrows the scope too much. Emergency health covers the full cycle of health protection from risk prediction, daily protection, emergency response to subsequent recovery, such as installing anti-fall handrails for elderly people living alone, pre-prevention and control of occupational injuries in factories, drinking water disinfection and infectious disease screening after floods, and even campus emergency care plans for children with a history of severe allergies, all of which are included in the category of emergency health. And first aid happens to be the only link in this system that connects the key node of "accidents have occurred and lives are being threatened". It is the most intuitive embodiment of emergency health effects.

There are actually different opinions in the industry on the priority of resource investment between the two. Most scholars who do research on the public health system believe that the proportion of investment in first aid education should be appropriately reduced, and more resources should be put into front-end risk investigation and prevention. After all, accidents can be nipped in the bud, and the cost-effectiveness ratio is much higher than subsequent rescue.； However, our front-line missionaries feel that the current awareness rate of first aid knowledge among the domestic public is less than 20%, and few people even know about the "4 Golden Minutes of Cardiac Arrest". Actively pay attention to the entire emergency health system - we have made statistics and found that 70% of the people who sign up for first aid training will eventually take the initiative to inquire about how to prepare home emergency medicine kits and how to prepare emergency plans for the elderly. On the contrary, they are much more receptive than if we directly come to the door to talk about emergency health science.

To put it bluntly, the relationship between the two is a bit like the safety guarantee you provide for your car. Emergency health is a full set of services from regular maintenance, installing a driving recorder, buying insurance to claiming and repairing after an accident. First aid is the first time you have a minor collision. The steps of pulling on the handbrake, turning on the double flashers, and putting up the triangle plate. If done correctly, you can avoid secondary accidents and reduce subsequent losses. However, if you never do good maintenance or understand traffic regulations, you cannot rely on on-site emergency operations to solve all problems when an accident occurs.

Now we are also adjusting our thinking when doing community education. We will not just hold a CPR simulator and let everyone practice. After each training, we will hand out a simple family emergency health checklist. From the stock of commonly used medicines to how to put emergency contact cards for elderly people living alone, everything is clearly listed. Chu, to put it bluntly, the two have always been complementary to each other. First aid focuses on the critical moment of "saving lives right now", while emergency health care provides full-chain protection of "less accidents, easier handling of accidents, and less suffering in the prognosis". Only when they are put together can we really protect the health of ordinary people.