Final practice meeting in Bolzano

The INFA project held the last of five planned practice workshops in Bolzano from 7-9 June 2024.

Hosting organisation White Cross presented their current approach for first aid training for persons with disabilities. Based on the local demand, they do not regularly keep methods and materials to teach inclusively available for mainstream courses, with the commonplace exception of people with mobility impairments where flexible solutions to some more physically demanding exercises are found. These cases are commonly cases of persons of old age rather than younger participants with disabilities.

White Cross have held and are recurrently holding courses for specific target groups with specific disabilities. There have been courses for persons with hearing impairments or visual impairments, but also dedicated courses for persons with intellectual and/or cognitive disabilities. In some cases, these courses were inclusive courses despite being dedicated offers, such as when inclusive employers asked for joint first aid trainings for their staff. For these courses, alternative teaching materials are available at White Cross such as graphics and pictograms and maintained together with materials for other target groups (e.g. foreign language versions of videos for courses mostly visited by foreigners).

For each of these courses, the instructors conduct a dedicated preparation with target-group specific curation of alternative materials to use – though not all of the materials used are part of the “regular library” available to the teaching staff. The discussion touched on the subject that mainstreaming trainer preparation and formalizing the materials library would be a key step in building more capacity for inclusive courses in general.

Besides the presentation and discussion of WK’s practices, a key segment of the meeting was a talk by and discussion with a representative from a local association for people with hearing impairments (EhK). The association had, in collaboration with WK, developed guidelines for communication with persons with hearing impairments in emergencies and their representative carried over the concepts from these guidelines to the sphere of first aid training.