What is the relationship between first aid and emergency health?

Essentially, first aid is the core link at the front end of the emergency health system. It is the only part of the entire health emergency intervention chain that can be directly participated by the general public and directly determines the final outcome of the incident.

I have been doing grassroots emergency science popularization for almost 5 years. Last summer, I encountered a myocardial infarction incident at the free clinic at the gate of the community. 62-year-old Uncle Zhang fell down as soon as he walked out of the market carrying a vegetable basket. Standing next to him was a courier boy who had just participated in our first aid training last month. He squatted down. When I felt the carotid artery and there was no pulse, I immediately asked someone to go to the nearby pharmacy to get an AED. I knelt down and performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The first defibrillation was completed in less than 4 minutes. By the time the 120 ambulance arrived, Uncle Zhang had already resumed breathing on his own. Later, there were no sequelae during follow-up visits. If you think about it, emergency health itself is a public health system that covers the entire chain of risk prediction, pre-hospital treatment, in-hospital treatment, and postoperative rehabilitation. If there is no first-aid link at the front that ordinary people can get started with, no matter how smooth the emergency green channel is and how perfect the postoperative rehabilitation plan is, it will not be able to cope with emergencies such as myocardial infarction, sudden death, and foreign bodies in the airway, where the golden rescue time is only a few minutes.

Of course, there are different voices in the industry. When I attended the provincial emergency health summit last time, experts with disease control experts pointed out that the role of first aid should not be overestimated. After all, the core of emergency health is "combination of prevention and rescue." If we only focus on the back-end first aid training, we will ignore the early risk screening. Check - for example, regular follow-up visits for elderly people with underlying diseases, provision of AEDs and first-aid kits for crowded places such as school offices, and health monitoring for practitioners in high-risk positions. No matter how superb the first-aid technology is, it is just to make up for the leaks afterwards, and the risks that can be avoided are actually very limited. I actually quite agree with this. The year before last, a 19-year-old college student in our jurisdiction died suddenly while playing night ball. None of the people on the court knew how to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation. By the time 120 arrived, the rescue time had already been missed. Later, when I checked his physical examination report, I found that he had detected abnormal cardiac enzymes six months ago, but he didn't take it seriously. The school's physical examination follow-up did not keep up, which meant that both the front-end risk warning and the back-end emergency treatment were out of sync.

But to put it another way, first aid is also the most grounded connection point between ordinary people and the entire emergency health system. Most ordinary people may not understand the response levels of public health emergencies and the regional emergency medical resource dispatch rules, but they have learned the Heimlich method and can rescue their children immediately when their children are choked by jelly. They know that when calling 120, they must first state the detailed address, the patient's underlying disease and the current state of consciousness. This is equivalent to putting the effectiveness of the entire emergency health system on themselves and those around them. To use an inappropriate analogy, emergency health is like a safety protection system for the health and safety of the whole society. The early risk screening and plans are the early warning sensors in the backend, the medical treatment in the backend is the cushion, and first aid is the trigger button at the front of the system. No matter how accurate the warning is and how thick the buffer is, if no one presses the button, the entire system will be in vain when something happens.