What is the relationship between first aid and emergency health

First aid is essentially the front-end contact point of the emergency health system, and it is also the most critical link in converting the public value of emergency health into individual survival benefits. The two are deeply nested from top-level plans to implementation, and from daily reserves to emergency response.

Don’t think that these two are abstract concepts floating in documents. Let me tell you a real story that I encountered while doing emergency training in the community a while ago: Last month, Lao Zhou in the community had a heart attack when he went downstairs to throw garbage. He fell straight in front of the unit door. There happened to be someone in the building who had just participated in the street emergency health science class. The little girl immediately rushed to perform chest compressions. The property manager ran to get the AED provided in the corridor. Except for the two tremors, by the time 120 arrived, the person had resumed weak spontaneous breathing. Later, the emergency room colleagues said that if he had been delayed by two or three minutes, he would probably be in a vegetative state even if he was rescued. You see, this is the preparatory work that emergency health usually does, such as material allocation and popular science training. When it comes to specific first aid actions, it directly saves a life.

Many people think that first aid is just a piecemeal technique of putting on a tourniquet and performing chest compressions, which is incompatible with the larger emergency health system. In fact, this is not the case at all. We often use an analogy when doing grassroots public health. Emergency health is a safety net that covers the entire chain of policy design, material reserves, science training, clinical treatment, and postoperative follow-up. First aid is the stress-bearing node closest to everyone on this network. When an emergency occurs, first aid must be used to protect people. Only the emergency green channel and follow-up rehabilitation follow-up in the emergency health system can play a role.

Nowadays, the industry has different discussion directions on the relationship between the two. Most colleagues who work in emergency clinics tend to believe that first aid is the core of emergency health. After all, whether it is daily emergencies or rescue in disaster scenes, the golden rescue time is only a few minutes. If the first aid is not caught, no matter how perfect the system behind it is, it will not be able to fill this gap; friends who work in public health policy will feel that the two cannot be combined. The relationship between patients and patients has been narrowed to on-site treatment. Now many pilot cities have included post-emergency follow-up into the unified emergency health system. For example, for patients who have been rescued from cardiac arrest, the community emergency health follow-up team will regularly come to measure heart rate, adjust medication, and even provide home first aid training for family members to avoid secondary dangers. This actually extends the boundaries of first aid and completely connects with the closed-loop management of emergency health.

Two years ago, I participated in mountain emergency rescue drills, simulating the scene of a traveler losing his footing and falling off a cliff. The search and rescue team's on-site hemostasis and fracture fixation were first aid, and the 120's monitoring during transportation and emergency surgical docking were extended links of first aid. Even the follow-up wound infection monitoring by disease control personnel and the rehabilitation plan for early connection with the community are actually strung together in the chain of first aid and emergency health. In practice, you will find that these two cannot be separated at all.