Multiple practices showcased at Kiel meeting

At a recent meeting in Kiel, Germany, project partner ASB presented practices on first aid training in the context of inclusive schools as well as on first aid training for persons with visual impairment.

The consortium met from 13-15 October 2023 at the Schleswig-Holstein state office of ASB.

The first project, titled “Pausenhelfer:innen inklusiv” (lit. “inclusive school break helpers”) is a school paramedic initiative for special education and inclusive schools. Adapted teaching materials and trainings spanning over several weeks enable children with disabilities to provide or contribute to effective first aid in case of typical injuries that happen during school hours or breaks, such as wounds or sports injuries. The practice empowers students with and without disability to be able to help in the everyday emergencies that can occur. Learning results are kept flexible, but the level of responsibility for the trained school paramedics is adapted by the individual schools depending on the results achieved (from school paramedics on call for the whole school during break times, like in comparable school paramedic projects without an inclusion aspect, to responsibility only for the immediate surroundings such as one’s own classroom).

Several schools in Kiel and the surrounding area are already partner to the project and the local ASB association is offering to the training to other special education and inclusive schools as well. Expansion to out-of-school contexts such as youth work initiatives and inclusive youth groups in sports clubs is being explored.

A second practice that was presented were the first aid courses for blind people and people with visual impairments. The initiative by the ASB branch Berlin-Südwest has a hybrid approach to teaching – it began with telephone trainings via audio only conference calls. In 1 1/2 hours, instructors provided theoretical first aid knowledge. This way of teaching naturally took all visual aspects out of the lesson, while the content was adopted to also conduct first aid measures without any visual cues (e.g. symptoms like paleness are hard to determine, but cold hands can be felt.)

A practical course was also offered which compensated the visual support of teaching by a higher ratio of trainers to trainees. This made it feasible to show things by touch that would normally have been explained by visual demonstration in a much shorter timeframe (e.g. finding the right spot to compress for CPR).

The following meeting of the INFA project is planned for North Macedonia in early 2024.