First Aid Teaching

After spending most of the last month sorting out UCAS and my Personal Statement, I have now applied to university!

Over the last few months, I've attended a few Red Cross training sessions. We were taught CPR, bandaging, recovery position and also how to react and help in a few other situations. The point of the scheme was to eventually have us teaching younger years First Aid.

On Tuesday and today (Thursday) in our PD sessions, we taught the Year 12s basic First Aid - recovery position, CPR and bandaging. Both times, we had fairly large groups (30+!) and were in a noisy environment (with other groups in the sports hall). My team consisted of 3 of us and we had 20-25 minutes to teach our peers these 3 potentially life-saving skills. Obviously we had to be fairly quick, but also engage the audience! We planned our session and decided each of us would do a demonstration of one type of First Aid (I did CPR with breaths) to the whole group, then we would split the group into 3 smaller groups (10 or so) and get them to do it.

I found the whole experience new and exciting, if a little challenging! We had to convey a lot of important information in a very short space of time (and so used "Golden Rules" for each method of First Aid). We also had to engage the audience and compete with a noisy and distracting environment. Generally, I found our groups responded well and I felt they'd learned something. Volunteers got involved and did CPR correctly on a Little Anne. Hopefully, I'll be able to get involved in future peer mentoring schemes with the Red Cross - it's possible in the future we will teach First Aid to other years or run sessions about HIV on World AIDS Day - I look forward to getting involved in this!


In other news, I've managed to secure a placement in a Biochemistry Lab in a hospital. I'll be going there tomorrow and hope I'll learn a lot about research methods in hospitals. I'm also starting volunteering at my local hospital soon, which will involve seeing and talking to patients. I look forward to both of these exciting opportunities!