What does the relationship between first aid and emergency health include

Essentially, first aid is the "frontier outpost" of the emergency health system. The two have a symbiotic relationship that covers all risk scenarios, connects pre-hospital and in-hospital treatment, and links the public with professional medical care. All actions revolve around the same core goal of "reducing the death and disability rate caused by health emergencies." If we think of emergency health as a safety net that covers all sudden health risks, then first aid is the row of knots at the front of the net that receives the most stress. Only the knots are strong enough to be able to catch a person who falls.

Two years ago, when I was on duty as a first-aid science popularization point in the community, I encountered a real incident. The 62-year-old Uncle Zhang in the community suffered a heart attack and fell to the ground while walking. Standing next to him was a young man who had just attended our class last month. He immediately knelt down to perform chest compressions. He even called someone to get the AED at the door of the unit building. After defibrillation, the uncle resumed breathing on his own. When 120 was transferred to the hospital, the doctor who treated him said that if he had been delayed by two minutes, he would probably have suffered serious brain damage even if he was rescued. You see, this is a true portrayal of how emergency care has moved the emergency health defense line a full two kilometers forward from the hospital emergency room. After all, in the golden 4 minutes of cardiac arrest, it is probably too late to wait for the ambulance to arrive.

There is still a lot of debate about the boundary between the two in the industry. Many experts with clinical experience believe that first aid is too professional. Even if ordinary people have received simple training, they can easily cause secondary injuries due to on-site panic and irregular operations. For example, chest compressions can break ribs and cause pneumothorax, and excessive force in the Heimlich maneuver can damage organs. Therefore, it is advocated that the core of the construction of the emergency health system should be to expand the professional first aid team and shorten the first aid response time. Non-professionals are not encouraged to rush into it; Most practitioners who have been doing grassroots emergency science popularization believe that the golden window for treatment of emergencies such as cardiac arrest and airway foreign body obstruction is only a few minutes. By the time professional first responders arrive, the best opportunity has often been missed. Ordinary people who have undergone standardized science popularization can start to rescue, even if there are small operational deviations, it is far better than letting the situation worsen. In the past two years, the exemption regulations for rescue have been introduced one after another in various places. In fact, they balance the concerns of the two points of view, while providing the public with first aid support, while also gradually standardizing the standard process of science popularization.

After talking about the front-end on-site treatment, in fact, the follow-up links of first aid are also embedded in the emergency health system. For example, last summer when the local temperature continued to be 40 degrees Celsius and there was a high incidence of heat stroke, the 120 dispatch center directly activated the emergency health plan and linked the city's community health service centers to conduct pre-diversion. Mild heatstroke patients were directly transferred to the nearest community point for cooling and rehydration. For severe heat stroke, ambulances were given priority to be transferred to the nearest hospital. The tertiary hospitals in the cooling unit also synchronized the emergency vacancy information of each hospital to the dispatching station in advance to avoid leaving patients empty. During that period, the emergency response speed was nearly two minutes faster than usual. If the emergency center alone coordinated its own resources, it would not be able to handle the more than 300 emergency calls a day during that period.

When I do popular science for people, I always say, don’t think of first aid as something too far away, and don’t think of emergency health as something that only government departments have to deal with. The iodine and band-aids that you always keep in your bag, the locations of nearby first aid points stored in your phone, and even the cardiopulmonary resuscitation that you spend an hour learning are actually just twisting the two together to give yourself and those around you a good idea.