First Aid for Mental Health

Measures to ensure COVID-Safe Training

We do lots of things to keep you safe from COVID on your first aid course.

Many of them have always been part of our courses (but you may not have been aware of them), and some of them are new.

We've summarised them below, but if you'd like more detail, scroll down to see an explanation.

• Extra equipment
• Cleaning & disinfecting
• One-way valves on manikin lungs
• PPE - Wipes, gloves, sanitiser, hand washing, face masks
• Social distancing
• Reduced delegate numbers
• COVID protocols
• Blended (part online, part face-to-face) courses
• Online-only courses
• Before the course
• Changes on arrival
• After the course
• Measures are always under review

Extra Equipment

We've invested in even more equipment so we can minimise sharing of manikins and other training materials. In many cases, sharing has been stopped altogether. If you do share, we often provide separate faces (sounds more gruesome than it is) and separate lungs for the manikins.

Cleaning

Cleanliness has always been a huge part of our first aid courses, and that hasn't changed. We've always washed manikins between all courses, and used disinfecting fluid to sterilise them, and we still do so. We've also always used disinfecting wipes during courses to maintain cleanliness.

One-way valves

You might not have known about this one, but manikin lungs have, for as long as we can remember, had one-way valves in them. So if you do share (and that's very unlikely as we've already said), no air can get back to the mouth of the 'Annie'.

PPE

Courses are run with trainer and delegates in masks or visors. Gloves, wipes, hand sanitisers and hand washing are used where appropriate.

Social Distancing

Everyone knows about social distancing, so I don't need to go into it here. Suffice to say that we have social distancing on all our courses

Reduced Delegate Numbers

Of course increased social distancing does sometimes mean reduced numbers of delegates on courses. All our open courses are now limited to 8 - the safe number for our training rooms. And for courses on your premises, maximum numbers may be reduced, depending on the amount of space you have in your training room.

COVID Protocols

Some changes have been introduced to the courses themselves to comply with temporary COVID-safe protocols. For example choking vests are only used on manikins and bandaging can be done on 'dummy' limbs, rather than on other delegates. And in Dental and GP courses, BVMs are used instead of mouth-to-mouth. 

Blended Learning

Blended Learning involves part of the course being online and part face-to-face. This reduces the amount of time that delegates spend in the room together. Even when delegates get together, they can often do so in smaller numbers. We have several different blended courses, and the number is increasing. For most of the courses, you can run them whenever it suits you, and can pause and resume as many times as you like.

Online Courses

Some courses can be done completely online, and can again be paused and resumed as much as you like. Be aware that although the online courses show practical procedures (e.g. CPR), they do not fully replace practical training if that's what you need.

Before the course

For courses run at our training venues, we've assessed the rooms and made sure they're set up to allow social distancing with an appropriate number of delegates.

If the training is at your place, we speak with your course organiser to determine room size and discuss the number of people that can attend. We also discuss availability of hand sanitiser and other facilities.

On Arrival

On arrival, our trainer will carry out a further risk assessment to check that they're happy with the room setup and number of attendees. Attendees may also have their temperatures taken and be asked whether they have been in contact with someone with symptoms, and whether they should be self-isolating. If so, they will not be permitted to attend.

After the course

Should anyone develop symptoms within 14 days of the course, we ask that the course organiser responsible for that person contacts us. We will contact the trainer, and if delegates from more than one company are in attendance (open courses), we will contact each of the other organisations to let them know to follow government self-isolation guidelines.

Measures always under review

The above measures are kept under continual review, so that our courses comply with best practice and current government guidelines.