Emergency First Aid Fundamentals – MiniClass #1: Scene and Patient Assessment

Emergency First Aid Fundamentals – MiniClass #1: Scene and Patient Assessment.

A common thread runs through all first-responder education, regardless of whether that education is for law-enforcement officers, firefighters, paramedics, or EMTs: learning to assess a situation is at the top of essentials. Assessing factors such as the safety of a scene, the seriousness of a situation, understanding the need for additional help and understanding the risks to the rescuer’s personal safety are all realities drummed into the heads of these professionals. While there are (of course) curricula that should be reserved for the professionals, assessing a situation is not one of them. From the moment you arrive at the scene of a traumatic or medical emergency, you will need to mentally run through the assessment checklist shown on the opposite page. Committing this checklist to memory can help calm you during what might be a very chaotic scene, and your calmness can lead to a better outcome for the patient and scene assessment is broken into three parts covered in this mini class — the primary assessment, assessing the ABCs, and the secondary assessment.