How To Save Your Child's Life

FutureLearn, the social learning platform, and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), are partnering to introduce a series of basic first aid courses—the first, now open for enrolment, is aimed at increasing survival rates of children.

Every year, nearly one million children die from injuries and violence and millions more are hospitalised—mostly from unintentional accidents like drowning, car crashes, falls, burns and poisoning.  When a medical professional is not immediately available, it is often family members, friends or bystanders who are on the scene first and become the first critical step in the chain of survival.

This new course, “An introduction to child first aid: Saving young lives,” will give participants basic first aid principles and skills to evaluate and respond to the five most common causes of child injuries:

• Choking: Learn the signs of choking in an infant or child and how to safely relieve airway obstruction 
• Bleeding: Learn how to assess and properly stop a child’s nose bleed
• Burns:  Learn how to cool burns to relieve pain and reduce the chance of swelling and infections, and learn how to dress burn wounds
• Wounds and abrasions: Learn how to clean wounds and abrasions to avoid infection and manage bleeding
• Cardiac arrest: Learn how to administer rescue breaths and chest compressions to resuscitate an infant or a child

This two-week online course, starting 23 January 2017, will be taught by first aid experts from IFRC and its Global First Aid Reference Centre. The Red Cross Red Crescent network has been the world’s leading provider and trainer of first aid for more than 100 years and continues to train some 15 million people around the world annually.

As with all FutureLearn courses, learners can sign up and attend the course online for free. Statements of Participation are also available at the cost of £24. As this is an introductory first aid course, participants would need to enrol in formal first aid training to achieve official first aid certification.