Dr Hilary Jones On Baby Safety
Caring for a baby or toddler can be an intimidating experience. The home becomes a terrifying assault course of hidden dangers and lurking menaces.
Learn more through watching this video.
Step 1: The Issue
Keeping your child safe is a number one priority for any parent, yet a new Baby Safe survey suggests that over fifty percent of parents still wouldn’t know basic first aid skills to save their child’s life.
That’s not all; other stats report that nearly half a million under five need to go to casualty after accidents in their home.
The research was commissioned by Tesco Baby and Toddler Club and with me here to talk about it is Dr. Hillary Jones.
Step 2: Key Areas Of Danger
There are many areas of danger in the home; we know that there is something like half a million accidents that occur every year in children under five. Accidents on the stairs; accidents in the kitchen; if you just look around the kitchen there are electric sockets, there are kettles, there are sauce pans boiling, liquids on hobs, there are chemical agents under the sink. All manner of things can happen.
Step 3: Choking
Chocking particularly is very dangerous and this can happen unpredictably to any child. Especially, after they have been weaned from liquids onto solids and it’s really important that parents learn how to undertake resuscitation of a child who may be choking.
Step 4: Combating Choking
I think with choking the first thing is to find out whether you can encourage the child to cough up whatever is causing the obstruction. So encourage them, firmly, to cough something out.
If they can’t do that you need to go onto the next step of resuscitation.
Start by picking the child up gently and getting your forefinger and thumb to lift the chin up to open the airway and then get your child laying facedown across your forearm with the head angulated downwards and what you’re going to do now is deliver up to five back slaps.
Now to do this you’re going to use the heel of your hand between the shoulder blades and you’re going to deliver back slaps one after the other, but checking each time to see if the first back slap has been successful. You’re looking if anything has been coughed up.
If this isn’t successful after five backslaps. Turn the child over onto a firm surface. Make sure the head is tilted backwards, again to keep the airway open, and now you’re going to do five chest compressions.
In order to do this you use two fingers of one hand to push down in the centre of a child’s chest, to a depth of about a third of the depth of a child’s chest, and you’re going to do that at a rate of about one hundred compressions per minute.
Once you’ve done five of those if still the obstruction hasn’t cleared you’re going to do the whole thing over again and revert back to the back slaps and you are to continue doing that until either you have been successful or until professional help arrives.
Step 5: Parents' Problems
I think that when parents are confronted with an emergency, and it’s their own child, it’s so difficult to remain objective and it’s very easy to panic.
You can’t trust your instincts because if you haven’t got the experience, suddenly everything goes to ruin and you don’t know what to do.
I think it’s very important for people to go on to some kind of practical skills course where they can learn the basics, first aid, resuscitation, recovery position; that sort of thing.
Tesco Baby and Toddler Club have introduced a Baby Safe campaign which is designed to offer twenty free two hour seminars on child safety to their customers so that they can learn these skills.
If people want to register they can logon to www.tesco.com/babyclub and if people logon to that; register; go to the events section; find out where these are taking place; they can come along and learn everything that’s necessary to potentially one day save a life.
