FIRST AID CLASS DOS AND DON’TS

Little Anne’s Twelve Top Tips on How to Behave During Your First Aid Class

They say never to work with children or animals, but adults can be just as unpredictable!

In a recent interview, Little Anne, the world-famous CPR manikin, shared their observations and recommendations on the behaviour of first aid course students. Here’s what you need to know before your next first aid class.

1. Preparation for your training

Ensure you know the course location. Don’t show up at the instructor’s private residence expecting to be welcomed into a first aid class.

Don’t go out on the town the night before your course and arrive hideously hungover and reeking of alcohol.

Don’t come to class if you are a vampire or the kind of person who thinks it’s OK to show up wearing nothing but a long overcoat.

Remember your ABC checklist — Armpits, Breath and Clothing.

2. What to wear —clothing no-nos

Avoid wearing a mini skirt, tight pants, low-rise jeans with no belt, flip-flops, unlaced runners, high heels, a plunging neckline or lipstick. The instructor won’t turn you away from the class, but if you arrive wearing any of the above, you’ll spend the next eight hours regretting your wardrobe choices.

3. Gum

Dispose of your gum before class. Why? Because chewing gum while practicing first aid skills is a hazard which could result in you choking to death. The good news is that you’d be in the right place to choke. The bad news is you may get your ribs cracked by an over-enthusiastic would-be hero classmate.

Don’t stuff your gum inside the manikin’s mouth or up its nose, which is disgusting. The instructor may not see you do it, but you’ll be their chief suspect when they notice you stuck gum up your own nose.

4. Participation and enthusiasm

Even if your boss or the judge has forced you to attend the class, avoid groaning loudly and rolling your eyes whenever the instructor asks you to get up to practice first aid skills. Unless you’re eighty, then we’ll understand that getting up is the problem, and the groans are justified.

5. First aid equipment

First aid equipment is expensive. Treat your manikin like a person. Don’t rip its head off, write on it, or drop it on the floor. And this person does not consent to you grabbing their chest or putting your CPR mask aside and giving them the “kiss of life.”

Also, please don’t draw pictures of penises on your clipboard or wipe your nose on the triangular bandages.

6. Questions and stories

If you put your hand up to answer a question, don’t launch into a long shaggy dog tale about the time uncle Bob fell off his horse and suffered gruesome injuries while wrestling with a barbed wire fence. Nobody wants to hear the gory details or have an update on the current state of uncle Bob’s physical and mental health. They don’t care.

7. CPR techniques

During the CPR section, your instructor will tell you to push on the casualty’s chest hard and fast. They may suggest playing the Bee Gees song “Stayin’ Alive” in your mind to help you to perform compressions at the correct rate.

But there’s no need to do your impression of John Travolta during the practice session or scream Stayin’ Alive in a high-pitched Barry Gibb impersonation while pumping your manikin’s chest.

You might raise a chuckle from your classmates. Still, you’ll likely get an eye roll from your instructor, who, during the lunch break, has already started writing rough notes for their book “My life of hell as a first aid instructor.”

8. Glass eye

During the eye injuries portion of the class, don’t volunteer to be the casualty if you have a glass eye. When your partner shines their penlight in your eye, the pupil in your glass eye will not react. They will freak out, call 911, and have you carted off to the hospital with a suspected stroke. Remember the old first aid mantra “If your pupils can’t dilate, don’t participate.”

9. Recovery position

If you volunteer to lie on your side and help demo the recovery position, don’t:

• Take the opportunity to have a nap.
• Go limp and become a floppy dead weight.
• Resist hard in the opposite direction when the instructor tries to pull you onto your side.
• Immediately roll back onto your back, letting your arms and legs fall back into their original position. You are not a toddler. Don’t behave like one.

10. Arguing with the instructor

First aid techniques and protocols get updated regularly, and that arm flapping thing you learned in Scouts in the 80s is now out the window.

In the video below, we see Mr. Bean performing CPR by pumping a person’s chest with his foot. If you’ve been using this technique until now, it’s time to take a first-aid class and update your skills.

11. Distracting behaviours

There are better times to catch up with your knitting. The clicking of knitting needles is distracting to the rest of the class and the instructor. Sure, Uncle Bob sustained that gruesome neck injury you insisted on describing in such vividly unpleasant detail earlier.

Still, he’ll have to wait a little longer for the scarf you’re making to cover the scars. He should have known better than to taunt that grizzly while horse-riding drunk and naked at the farm over Thanksgiving.

12. The test

After the instructor has handed out the test papers, please don’t pull a foot-long spicy Hungarian salami from your backpack and start slicing and eating it with loud chewing noises.

What is WRONG with you?!

And I can see you Googling the answers. Do you really want to be that guy?

So there you have it, folks — Annie’s top tips for a successful first aid class. These anecdotes are almost all based on scenarios experienced during 24 years of conducting first aid classes with my team of Red Cross instructors at Safe + Sound First Aid Training and our faithful friends, Little Anne & Co.

One more thing. If at the start of class, you notice your instructor has their name badge on upside down, don’t wait until the end of the day to let them know or point out this embarrassing fact in front of your classmates. Mention it to the instructor discretely as soon as you have an opportunity. I — I mean, they — will be enormously grateful. Thank you.

© Gill McCulloch, February 2023

Thanks for reading, and thanks to Kristine Laco for editing! If you’d like to get an email when I publish, please subscribe here. You can find a full list of my stories here.