Abstract:

Pre-medical (lay) first aid is care provided to a casualty prior to the arrival of a qualified professional. It has been verified that the first 15 minutes after an accident are most important and decisive for the survival of a casualty. School is a frequent place of accidents. Therefore the authors decided to carry out a long-term (2008–2014) research mapping the level of pre-medical first aid competencies of selected educational professionals. The study aimed to find out whether and to what extent the selected educational professionals were competent to provide lay first aid, to understand possible gaps in these competencies and establish corresponding training needs. The research sample consisted of 1000 educational professionals – teachers in preschools, elementary and secondary schools with different degrees and duration of professional experience. A quantitative method was used (questionnaire) in the research. The respondents completed a questionnaire consisting of two parts. The first part focused on selected attitudes, opinions and experience with providing pre-medical first aid and the second part contained a didactic test.

The results show that respondents failed the most in questions on cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Many of them also failed in the question how to stop bleeding (only 35 % of correct answers) and how to provide first aid in case of epileptic seizure (45 % of correct answers). It is clear that the failures stated above might have been affected by unfamiliarity with the update of international recommended resuscitation procedures (first aid) which are updated every five years and most teachers do not receive a pre-medical first aid training where they could learn about it (83 % of respondents claimed that).

Regarding the size of the sample, it is certainly not possible to generalise the presented research. However, the authors believe that it is necessary to take very seriously every sign of incompetency which might put a child's health or life at risk in a real-life situation at school. The correct provision of pre-medical first aid is one of the very important skills for educational professionals and they do not question the importance of such skills. They feel quite uncertain about their knowledge and skills in terms of the provision of lay first aid which cannot be eliminated by a simple instruction (guidance, lecture etc.). The current situation may be solved only by systematic training of educational professionals based not only on knowledge acquisition but mainly on hands-on exercises (practical skills acquisition). Annual training within OSH (occupational safety and health) is evidently insufficient.

Keywords:

Pre-medical first aid, educational professionals, competences, training.