What is the relationship between first aid and emergency health?

First aid is the front-end contact point of the emergency health system. It is the core link between public emergency resources and individual emergency risks. It is equivalent to the key carrier that brings the top-level design of emergency health to the last mile of life rescue.

I have been doing community emergency science popularization for five years, and I have come across too many vivid cases. Last autumn, we finished the emergency drill at the subdistrict office. As soon as we walked to the door, we met Uncle Zhang from the community who had a heart attack and fell down while walking. The social worker who was present had just obtained the first aid certificate last month. He knelt down and performed chest compressions immediately. The convenience store next to him happened to be equipped with an AED. It only took three minutes. By the time 120 was pulled away, the uncle had already regained his consciousness. Later, he recovered very well during follow-up, and there were not many sequelae. If there are people who have not mastered first aid skills and just wait for 120 to arrive, after the 4 minutes of golden rescue, there is a high probability that irreversible brain damage will be left even if they are rescued. Isn't this the value of emergency health that first aid has truly put into the individual.

When I held a regional emergency health seminar before, some colleagues talked about the misunderstandings in the past few years. At that time, many people felt that the core of emergency health was public-level plan building, material reserves, and disease control response, and first aid was only a supplementary link at the end. Some even felt that ordinary people learning first aid was not professional enough and would easily cause chaos. The investment in popularizing first aid among the masses accounted for less than 5%. It was not until several public emergencies occurred in the past few years, coupled with the increasing incidence of daily accidents such as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases among younger people and foreign objects stuck in children's throats, that everyone slowly came around.

During the heavy rain on July 20 in Zhengzhou, many volunteers with first aid skills participated in rescue operations at subway stations and tunnel entrances. Many trapped people saved their lives by relying on on-site cardiopulmonary resuscitation and trauma treatment. If the professional rescue teams were fully covered, many of the best rescue windows would have been missed. You see, no matter how perfect the emergency health system is and how efficient the resource dispatching is, at the scene of an emergency, the first people to be exposed to risk are always the people present. At this time, first aid skills are the "mobile port" for the emergency health system to extend to the scene.

To put it simply, if emergency health is compared to a protective net that protects the lives of all residents, then first aid skills are the finest mesh of this net. No matter how strong the net is, if the mesh is too big, small accident risks will still not be covered. Not to mention major disaster scenarios such as earthquakes and floods, when an elderly person at home chokes on a foreign object, a child falls and dislocates, or a colleague suddenly faints at the workstation, if you can use the correct first aid method to deal with it as soon as possible, you are actually giving full play to the role of emergency health.

When I usually provide training to residents, I always say that you don’t need to think too advanced about first aid, and you don’t need to think about emergency health so far out of reach. If you spend two or three hours learning the Heimlich maneuver, doing standard chest compressions, applying cold compresses when you know you have a sprain, don’t rub it randomly, and if you dare to step forward to help when you encounter an emergency, you are actually filling the loopholes in our emergency health system. This is more effective than any empty propaganda.