Working in the healthcare industry is an extraordinary privileged role. You will often be caring for people when they are at their most vulnerable.

Being in a privileged role, its is important to recognise that you should be patient focused and the attitudes and beliefs that you hold can influence the care you provide to your patient.

Duty of care is a civil law concept within the UK and exists to ensure that one party does not allow unreasonable harm or loss to occur to another.

As a Healthcare provider, you owe a duty of care to your patient from the point at which they accept it.

From that point onward you must act in a way to prevent harm where as reasonable person might see that harm might occur.

If you breach this duty of care and someone suffers as a result, then this can lead to the civil wrong of negligence.

You will regularly have to apply the concepts of consent and mental capacity to your work, often in challenging situations, where a rapid assessment and fast action may be required to determine a defendable and lawful decision.

Having a good understanding of the basic principles will make this easier and help to remove doubt when tackling challenging and potentially confusing scenarios.

There is more on this in your induction module!

Asking permission to help video - click here

Consent in First Aid - video here

You have a duty of confidentiality to your patients, to protect all patient information and handle it in a appropriate manner.

What is considered patient identifiable information?

• name

• address

• date of birth

• clinical records

• clinical record numbers

• images of the patient

• rare disease information

this list is not exhaustive.

There is more on this in your induction module!

Abuse or neglect is a commonly encountered scenario for those working in healthcare.

You are likely to be in a key position to be able to assist victims of abuse or neglect

There is more on this in your induction module!

In our experience people attending first aid training are often initially reluctant participants, this is in many cases due to the fears and concerns that people have regarding the administration of first aid. Addressing these fears and showing how easily these fears can be removed, makes the rest of the training much easier to understand and enjoy.

The Fear of Infection by coming into contact with blood, vomit or other bodily fluids is understandable. This fear is addressed by training first aiders in the effective use of barriers, such as gloves and face shields and taking precautions to ensure that they can protect themselves against infections such as HIV or Hepatitis when delivering first aid.

Fear of doing something wrong or hurting the patient, this is a common fear, particularly when delivering chest compressions. Sometimes people don't want to do CPR, delay starting or don't do it because they don't want to harm the patient. A patient who is not breathing and has no heartbeat is dead, performing chest compressions in CPR cannot harm or hurt them, it can only help, the most harm would be in not delivering chest compressions at all.

In many cases first aid will involve providing comfort to a patient, monitoring them and making sure that the emergency services have been contacted if necessary. You will find that when faced with a situation, your training will come back to you and you will know how to respond