Scene Safety

What we are going to do now is look at scene safety. Now, here is this very simulated here, but we are looking at maybe a car accident. So the first thing you need to do is not to directly approach it straight away, but look at what the scene is, what dangers are there. And if it's a car accident, firstly, are there any other cars around or any people, you need to do a quick risk assessment and also look at who is involved. Now in this scenario, we will just keep it nice and simple that, Damian's driven into a wall or something like that. We know there's only one person involved. So if we are approaching the car, we need to look for lots of things. Is there fluid around? Now the fluid could be water, it could be oil or it could be petrol or diesel. So you do need to make sure whether there is fuel there, is there a potential fire risk? There's a car accident and there could be glass, what's the vehicle carrying? Maybe it's a van or something like that, and it's got a chemical or gas in there. So do what you can and a quick walk around to make sure that you can see what the dangers are, can be really useful.

Particularly looking at the back of the vehicle, there may be markings on there for compressed gas or something like that and so try and be aware of exactly what you are going into. Remember, stop, think, then act. So the first thing is to stop, have a look at the situation, you can talk to the person. Now if it is a car accident, try and always do that from the front, because we don't want Damian to turn his head around like that to talk to me. So if you are approaching, try and approach from the front and then from that area, you can talk to him directly. So you just say, "Stay where you are, don't move, don't turn your head. My name is Keith, I'm a first aider. Can I help you?" You can do this all from a distance, this is all in the stop and think side of things, so plan what you are going to do. Next thing, pop your gloves on, so pop the gloves on so that you know, yeah, you are safe and you can do that from a distance and the whole time, if you stood towards the front, you could be talking to the person at the same time, as you are checking your gloves, popping your gloves on and just be ready to treat the patient.

Now, if you got a first aid kit at hand, you can get hold of that or get somebody else to get that for you, but right now we don't really know what the problem is. So from here, we have got PPE on, put the gloves on, you can approach. One thing you do as you are approaching a vehicle is just say, "Look at my hand." You can hold the hand right in front of the windscreen, so you can just look at that and as you approach around from the side, you can make sure he's still looking forward and you can just tell him because you do not want to shock him at all, tell him to keep his head exactly where it is. This is just in case of spinal injury. Now in this film, we are not going to look at all the individual possible injuries, we are just looking at scene safety because we will cover that in another video. So check to start with, communicate with him the whole time, keep on looking out for dangers, if this car is crashes, then there might be another one, it might be other dangers around. There might be children, dogs, all sorts of things. So as you approach the car, have a look through, look in the back, see what else is there or any other vehicles. But if Damian's there you can ask him these questions as well.

So you can say, "Are you travelling alone? Is there anyone else in the vehicle? Do you have any pets in the vehicle? There's nothing dangerous in the vehicle?" So all these things, and they are good things to be talking to him about and communicating. So no matter whether you are dealing with a situation here with an adult in a car accident or this could be a child has fallen over and you might be talking to the mother or the childminder or the child themselves to actually get as much information as possible. And also if someone is talking and they feel they are being cared for throughout this scene safety and the initial inspection of what is going on, it's going to make them feel a lot more comfortable that you are there to actually help them. So once you have done the scene safety and actually approaching, then from here, we can open up the door, we can talk directly to Damian, we can find out what has happened. The most important thing also is to make sure the engine is turned off. So turn it off, make sure the key is fully removed, just so there's no chance of it ever actually starting up.

We can ask him or we can look for injuries because you might not know exactly what's wrong, so you can look for blood or deformity or injury and things like that. Talk to him, find out what's what and just make sure that we have got all the right care going. Now throughout this process also, we have stopped at an accident, we have already gone through calling for help, but it may well be at this stage that you start seeing injuries, if it's just a minor that's where you want to call emergency services and tell them exactly what's wrong. So if it is just something minor, it may just be, we call an ambulance, just to get him checked out, or it might be the police, there are lots of things there that we can do. So in which case, you will just activate the emergency services where needed. If this example was elsewhere and you are dealing in a pediatric setting or something like that, then you would still go through the same process, you still make sure the scene is safe before you approach and start dealing with the patient.