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So, today I successfully passed my First Aid at Work course with St John Ambulance. The last three days have not only involved the dreadful thing of having to be arriving for 9am after 30-40 minutes travel to (rather than my usual arriving for 10am with 10 minutes travel), but it's basically been having huge amounts of information poured into my head, with liberal stirring from practice sessions in between.
It was somewhat nerve-wracking waiting to do the assessment, and immediately afterwards you dwell on all the tiny things you got wrong. But like everyone else in my class, I passed - they were teaching us to a level considerably above that which we were being tested at.
So, the inspiration for this particular post was![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
redhillian asking "how you feel having taken a point in green-hat levels, and what you think you'll do with it?" (for those that don't play Maelstrom, Green Hat is a term for the first aid crew there).
How do I feel? Rather tired, and like the information is leaking out of my ears, because we covered a lot of stuff in the last few days. But beyond that...
There's part of me that's now analysing the world in a new way, looking for risks, wondering what you would do where, etc. It's similar to having done drama GCSE when I watch a play, having studied graphic design when I look at type, or having been a traffic warden when I'm looking at parking spaces; when you've learned a chunk of specialist knowledge, it lets you 'look behind the curtain' in a way you don't do otherwise, and it creates a new set of possible situations for your brain to model and consider.
I certainly do feel more confident that, if there was some kind of accident around me, I'd be able to get involved, help people, do something rather than run, gawp, or otherwise be useless. What I did, would I get it all perfectly right? 'course not. But I'm confident that I know enough both to judge where to get involved, and what to do where I am.
What am I going to do with it?
Well, firstly, since my work paid for it, I'll be using my First Aid at Work course to be one of the First Aiders at work. There will now be three of us, which means we've got our twelve person office fairly well covered. I'm quite glad of this, because it means someone else should be around who knows what they're doing if anything does go wrong, but given of those three, I'm the one most often in the office (as both the others do rather more external events than I do, and one uses flexitime to not be in every day), in the long run I'll probably use it somewhen.
Secondly, at LARP. Maelstrom and other big events already have their dedicated First Aiders, so I'll be having a chat with them about what I should and shouldn't/can and can't do, but in the case of an accident basically I'd guess I'd mostly be doing the very immediate assessment, sending people for help with information, and stuff where it's best to have someone doing something immediatelly - applying pressure to a bleeding wound, opening someone's airways, CPR should it be apparent that was needed. In the Odyssey, where I crew, it might also involve helping with some of the simpler stuff where we're doing things in the forest a long way from them - giving someone an icepack for a sprained ankle or whatever. Assuming I'm not advised otherwise, I'll be looking into getting a LARP-appropriate looking pouch that I can fit a first aid kit in, so I can have one with me when I'm playing.
Smaller systems that I play in? I'll play it by ear; I'm quite wary of becoming anyone's dedicated/official first aider, in large part because that means I likely have less time to enjoy the game, assuming my qualification even covers me for that.
Beyond that, I already have a bag of many pockets and spaces, so I'm most likely going to keep the first aid kit I bought after finishing the course with me, unless it really proves to be too big/awkwardly sized (at which point, I might look into changing my bag - I've been considering such for a while anyway, as I think I could find a better one for how I use it), if it does, then I'd work out some smaller bag I could fit what I really needed in.
So, yes. I have gained a point in an ability (maybe I should've been saving up my xp to put it elswhere, but ah well), and while I'll be quite happy to never use these skills, I also feel calm about the idea of doing so, if it was needed.
The one thing I'm curious about is why St John Ambulance tell us not to use burn creams, then sell us a First Aid kit with burn cream in it.
It was somewhat nerve-wracking waiting to do the assessment, and immediately afterwards you dwell on all the tiny things you got wrong. But like everyone else in my class, I passed - they were teaching us to a level considerably above that which we were being tested at.
So, the inspiration for this particular post was
redhillian asking "how you feel having taken a point in green-hat levels, and what you think you'll do with it?" (for those that don't play Maelstrom, Green Hat is a term for the first aid crew there).How do I feel? Rather tired, and like the information is leaking out of my ears, because we covered a lot of stuff in the last few days. But beyond that...
There's part of me that's now analysing the world in a new way, looking for risks, wondering what you would do where, etc. It's similar to having done drama GCSE when I watch a play, having studied graphic design when I look at type, or having been a traffic warden when I'm looking at parking spaces; when you've learned a chunk of specialist knowledge, it lets you 'look behind the curtain' in a way you don't do otherwise, and it creates a new set of possible situations for your brain to model and consider.
I certainly do feel more confident that, if there was some kind of accident around me, I'd be able to get involved, help people, do something rather than run, gawp, or otherwise be useless. What I did, would I get it all perfectly right? 'course not. But I'm confident that I know enough both to judge where to get involved, and what to do where I am.
What am I going to do with it?
Well, firstly, since my work paid for it, I'll be using my First Aid at Work course to be one of the First Aiders at work. There will now be three of us, which means we've got our twelve person office fairly well covered. I'm quite glad of this, because it means someone else should be around who knows what they're doing if anything does go wrong, but given of those three, I'm the one most often in the office (as both the others do rather more external events than I do, and one uses flexitime to not be in every day), in the long run I'll probably use it somewhen.
Secondly, at LARP. Maelstrom and other big events already have their dedicated First Aiders, so I'll be having a chat with them about what I should and shouldn't/can and can't do, but in the case of an accident basically I'd guess I'd mostly be doing the very immediate assessment, sending people for help with information, and stuff where it's best to have someone doing something immediatelly - applying pressure to a bleeding wound, opening someone's airways, CPR should it be apparent that was needed. In the Odyssey, where I crew, it might also involve helping with some of the simpler stuff where we're doing things in the forest a long way from them - giving someone an icepack for a sprained ankle or whatever. Assuming I'm not advised otherwise, I'll be looking into getting a LARP-appropriate looking pouch that I can fit a first aid kit in, so I can have one with me when I'm playing.
Smaller systems that I play in? I'll play it by ear; I'm quite wary of becoming anyone's dedicated/official first aider, in large part because that means I likely have less time to enjoy the game, assuming my qualification even covers me for that.
Beyond that, I already have a bag of many pockets and spaces, so I'm most likely going to keep the first aid kit I bought after finishing the course with me, unless it really proves to be too big/awkwardly sized (at which point, I might look into changing my bag - I've been considering such for a while anyway, as I think I could find a better one for how I use it), if it does, then I'd work out some smaller bag I could fit what I really needed in.
So, yes. I have gained a point in an ability (maybe I should've been saving up my xp to put it elswhere, but ah well), and while I'll be quite happy to never use these skills, I also feel calm about the idea of doing so, if it was needed.
The one thing I'm curious about is why St John Ambulance tell us not to use burn creams, then sell us a First Aid kit with burn cream in it.
