First Aid Agency

About First Aid Agency

First aid is procured as a training product and needed as an operational response. The distance between those two is where preventable harm happens.

Ask an organisation about its first aid arrangements and the answer is almost always a number: how many trained people it has, and when their certificates expire. That is the measure the system produces, it is what appears in a compliance register, and it is close to unrelated to what happens when somebody collapses in a corridor at half past four.

What determines that is different and mostly unmeasured. Whether a trained person is actually on site at that hour, on that floor. Whether anybody knows who the trained people are without looking it up. Whether the equipment is where the plan says and whether it works. Whether the person who arrives has done anything since the course. Whether somebody calls for an ambulance in the first thirty seconds or spends four minutes deciding whether it is serious enough.

First Aid Agency is about organising first aid as an operational capability: coverage measured by hour, the first few minutes, equipment that is findable and working, skill decay between certifications, and what happens after an incident.

The editorial position is that first aid is bought as a training product and needed as a response, that most failures are organisational rather than clinical, and that certificate counts measure almost nothing about what would happen at half past four on a Sunday.

This publication is independent. It is not affiliated with any training provider, equipment supplier, ambulance service or regulator, it does not accept payment for coverage, and it does not deliver training or sell equipment.

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