Staff first aid training

The term ‘Health and Safety’ is used as a bit of a catch-all phrase – it seems to be everywhere and to mean an awful lot of different things.

However, if you think about its most basic parts, ‘health’ meaning the function of your own body, and ‘safety’ meaning your wellbeing, then our recent staff First Aid training is the very definition of us here at Clinic 95 taking your health and safely very seriously indeed.

And the General Dental Council does too, issuing directives to dental practices from the Resuscitation Council (UK) for us to follow.

So, with all this in mind, the team had our annual training session recently with the lovely Lynn Fox who took us through all the most up-to-date techniques.

We were trained on:

• Medical emergencies BLS + AED
• Asthma
• Anaphylaxis
• Chest pain
• BLS adult + Paed modifiers
• Fainting
• Seizures
• Unconscious / recovery positions
• Choking
• ABCDE approach

Meet the dummies

The way we learned the technique and skill to help save someone’s life was by using a couple of magnificent dummies – Eric and Alan.

They were brilliant on the night and hardly complained at all…

Sarah and Stacy managed to bag the fancy one, Eric, who lit up when they did the compressions correctly by showing the blood flow to the brain.
 
And we role played various scenarios in the surgery to show how we can adapt to multiple situations (such as performing chest compressions in the dental chair).

Altogether now…

Everyone signing Stayin’ Alive and Nelly The Elephant at the tops of their voices did provoke quite a bit of laughter, but once we got the giggling over with, we could quickly see the benefit. 

There’s no doubt these tunes are the perfect rhythm for chest compressions – and it’s such an easy tip to remember how to do something so important.

Lewis managed another laughing fit when speaking to the dummy (role playing shouting for help and checking for a response) which is a bit odd to start off with, but we all soon got the hang of it.

We were learning how to help save someone’s life.  For such a serious subject, the evening was surprisingly enjoyable, but the most important thing was just how much we were taught and how confident we felt having been trained so well.

We hope to never have to use our skills.  But if we do encounter medical emergencies at Clinic 95, we’re very well equipped to deal with them.