Fears of First Aid and Barriers

One fear of doing first aid is, you are going to catch something from the person you are doing first aid on. These can be blood-borne pathogens. This could be things like Hepatitis or HIV. And your skin is a very good barrier on its own. Your skin is quite effective of keeping these bacteria and infections out of your body. The problem happens is when you get a cut on your skin. Now, right now, you may not know where cuts are, it may be you got small cuts within your nails or on your hands and you are not quite sure. So what we do, is we always protect ourselves against any possible infection. All first aid kits would have gloves in. The idea of the gloves is it puts a barrier between you and a patient. It's very good because you are not then passing any possible infections from your hands, or dirt on your hands onto the patient, but also it protects the other way, that any blood from the patient will stay away from your skin itself. 

The gloves themselves come in different types. The gloves we got here are nitrile gloves. They're all vinyl type gloves and there is also the gloves, the plastic ones that you see in the likes in the petrol stations, they all work the same. One glove you don't see so much about now are latex gloves. This is because people can be allergic to the latex material. Before you put the gloves on, just trap some air in them and just give them a squeeze to make sure there are no holes. If the air comes out, there is possibly a hole. And it might be that during manufacturing, they got damaged. Also, when you are putting gloves on, be careful that if you got a ring that might, well, cut the glove, so maybe you need to turn that in or take the ring off. Just make sure there is nothing else, bracelets, watches something like that, anything that cause damage.

You don't have a left and a right, you just put them on either hand, it doesn't matter. So to start with, just take your time, just line up the thumb, and just pull the glove onto your hand. Now, most first aid kits would have a large size glove. Now it might be that this glove is too big for you, or too small. So just have a practice at some point with some gloves and find out which is the best size for you. Once the glove's on, just check them again, make sure when you are pulling it on, you don't pull too hard on the cuff of the glove, again you can sometimes rip it. If you do rip the glove, you need to remove the gloves and start again. Once you got the first the first glove on, pop the second one on in exactly the same way. Once the gloves are actually on, they will give you a good barrier. They will also give you a lot more confidence. If you have got gloves on and you are touching somebody, it's much, much easier. I know that martial arts is quite a contact sport anyway and you are used to touching people but somebody is not very well, it helps, it gives you confidence and also the confidence to the patient.

To remove the gloves is important as well. We don't just wanna pull them off because what can then happen is that blood on the outside could get into our skin. So what we do is just pinching the outside of the glove, pulling it in so it's inside out. Now, all the blood and things are inside that glove. Just scrunch that up into your hand. Once it's in the hand, we can then just put the fingers where there is no blood or either from the inside or the outside. Pull it inside out, over the hand. Now it's safe to hold onto this because all of the blood is inside. What we need to do with this now is dispose of it correctly. It may be you have got some kind of infectious waste bags, maybe not. They're not common in martial arts centres. These can be disposed of in the sanitary bins within the ladies toilets or they need to be just disposed of correctly. So maybe put them into a bag and then into another bag and dispose of them in a skip maybe for incineration. You can give this to the paramedics, they'll take it away for you as well or there may be other areas locally where you can dispose of the potentially infectious material.

Another time where there could be a risk of passing infection from a patient onto you would be if you are doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitations within CPR. For this, we can use a barrier that goes over the patient's face. Now with this particular type here, it comes in a key ring so you can keep it with you at all times. When you open it up, it's got a simple barrier which clips over the person's ears and then we got a one-way valve in the middle here. So when we're applying the air in, it passes through but it doesn't come back out. One fear you don't have to worry about with these would be if there is vomit or blood because you are putting your mouth onto here, you are not coming into direct contact with that, which means you can still deliver effective rescue breaths.

There are many types of a face shield. Another common one would be this one, it's called the pocket mask or oral nasal resuscitation mask. It's probably about the most effective barrier you can use. Usually comes in a plastic case so what you can also do with this is pop some gloves in there as well just so you got all your protective equipment in one place. The mask itself, it's got an airfield sack here so that actually seals nicely on the face and also an elastic strap to go around the head. You just push it out. Now, you are putting your mouth around this part here so you are blowing the air in and then it's being exhaled around, so that you are not coming to direct contact with the person's face. In fact, you see it's quite a long way from their face. With this type of mask, you are delivering breaths very effectively, not only in the mouth but also through the nose. If there wasn't any facial trauma, which could be a possible thing with the martial arts side, you are blowing it into the nose as well. So we're getting a maximum possible air going into the patient.

This valve on here is an oxygen feed. It may be that there is no oxygen available within your martial arts centre. If you do have oxygen available and you have got training in it, you can apply a tube onto here which will allow 100% oxygen to flow into the mouth, so when you blow in here, it's increasing the percentage of oxygen up to around about 50%. Now, if you don't have any of these masks, then you can still deliver the breaths. It's not a problem delivering them. The chance of any risk of the infection is low. However, if you don't want to take any risk at all, we'll talk later in the course about just doing compressions. So you can actually eliminate the need to do breaths altogether.