How Can First Aid Training Benefit You?

When you learn first aid, you hope that you'll never have to use your skills in an emergency. Ok, so you'll expect to have to use the odd plaster. Or perhaps you'll send someone to hospital to get a possible broken arm checked out.

But hopefully you'll never have to deal with a something as serious as a cardiac arrest.

However, thanks to your workplace first aid training, if you are confronted with an emergency you'll know what to do. You'll be able to respond quickly, effectively and calmly, dealing with the situation until the emergency services arrive.

But do you realise how many of the skills that you learn as a first aider will help you more widely in your work or home life?

Keeping Calm Under Pressure

Few situations test your ability to remain calm more than a medical emergency. In fact Kipling might almost have been thinking about first aiders when he wrote "if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs...".

First aiders are the ones who are brave enough to step forward and take charge of these emergencies. And they're just the kind of people you want around when the pressure's on at work.

Think about it...

You've got a big sales demo coming up, and you're right up against it getting the presentation together. Do you want someone calm, or someone who panicks dealing with it for you?

And what about for the presentation itself? A calmly delivered presentation will help to build confidence in your team and your products.

What about an IT system crisis (none of us ever have those, right?), or a critical negotiation with a potential new customer, key supplier or your bank?

And as project deadline day looms, you want your key staff calm and serene, regardless of how frantic the activity beneath the surface.

Building Leadership Skills

Becoming a first aider means learning leadership skills as well as medical ones. Your first aiders must be able to assess a situation rapidly, and respond quickly and positively. They must also take charge of the people around them. Perhaps that means giving them jobs to do ("get the defib and bring it here now") or clearing the area, or calming the injured party or colleagues.

And it doesn't matter where they are in the company hierarchy. First aiders tend to be those who are usually in the office or on the shop floor. So you might get a warehouse packer issuing instructions to a director to call an ambulance, while they deal with the emergency.

Improving Self-confidence and self-esteem

Of course learning new leadership skills itself helps to build self-confidence and self-esteem. And that confidence spreads throughout your working and non-working life.

Self-esteem is a measure of how we perceive and value ourselves. Low self-esteem is strongly linked to mental health problems. It makes decision-making much more difficult, and decreases work effectiveness and assertiveness.

Through their training, increased authority and leadership skills, first aiders gain increases in self-confidence and self-esteem, and this helps their effectiveness throughout their lives.

Ability to Deal with Emergencies

Perhaps the most obvious benefit though, is gaining the ability to deal with medical emergencies. It's the direct reason why people learn first aid, and why organisations are required by law to have first aiders.

First aiders have to be able to respond quickly. So they need to be in the right place at the right time (it's no good having your first aiders on the road all the time), and there need to be enough of them to cover for holidays, sicknesses and for different buildings and sites.

And they have to be able to drop their work at a moments notice to deal with an injury (think on-duty air traffic controllers!).

If they have all of the above going for them, we, will provide them with the skills they need to keep those around them safe and to minimise the long-term effects of illnesses and injuries.

Suitable First Aid Courses