August/September 2017 www.womanthismonth.com LIFESTYLE | wellbeing 54 Accidents and medical mishaps don’t always happen to ‘other people’. Are you equipped to effectively deal with emergency situations? Founder of the First Aid Box in Bahrain, Pamela Kamal, is an authority on all things first aid. She has been a registered nurse and midwife, as well as a first aid instructor and reflexologist. She gives us pointers on how we can make a difference to someone in medical need by knowing simple techniques, and outlines why everyone should be familiar with the basics. Pamela says: “The average time it takes an ambulance to arrive at the scene of a medical emergency can be around eight minutes, but in reality, it could well be 20 minutes at a busy time of day. Quickly responding to a medical emergency can make the difference between life and death. Take, for example, someone choking on their food in a restaurant, a child pulled out of the swimming pool not breathing, a family member collapsing, unresponsive. There’s no time to refer to a first aid manual or wait for an ambulance – a blocked airway can kill in three to four minutes. Brain and organ damage can occur at any point in those four minutes. Simply knowing the right thing to do in such situations gives the patient a fighting chance.” It’s a regular day at home, work, school, playing sport or driving. But in the eventuality of a situation that endangers your own, or someone else’s, life what’s the course of action, Behnaz Sanjana ponders. To the Rescue Road accidents are not uncommon in Bahrain, and onlookers who are willing to help fear that they may do the wrong thing, causing further injury to a casualty, or be harmed themselves. These reactions can often result in delayed aid or the quality of the treatment being compromised. Pamela gives us some basic first aid tips to keep in mind for emergencies (although Statistics from British charity St John Ambulance, show that in the UK alone around 140,000 people die each year in situations where basic first aid could have been beneficial. she states that these are not a substitute for equipping yourself with a proper training course).
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