Teaching Life Saving First Aid to the Population at Large

Abstract

The benefits of each citizen being proficient in first aid would be tremendous, particularly in disaster situations. There are different ways to attain such a goal, mass training in schools, driving schools, civil defence, and military forces being some of the more obvious. The essential procedures are few and very easy to teach: Airway control, ventilation, control of external bleeding, and positioning of severely injured victims; but the number to be taught is enormous and shortage of both trained, devoted instructors and carefully planned first aid programs have hampered attempts at such mass training. A course in first aid which can be conducted without first aid instructors has recently been available, and was tested to see whether this self instructing course could fill the gap. For the test, driving school students and the driving public were chosen to represent average lay people.