By: Lia Contesso
Submitted: 2010-08-13 05:59:26 | Word Count: 530
In many companies some workers attend medical aid courses to be able to give their help in case of necessity while the ambulance arrives: the duration of a medical aid course, depending on the kind of company, varies from 12 to 16 hours.
The workers of the bigger companies will need to attend the 16 hours course, while the smaller ones can attend the 12 hours one. But it’s not only the size of the company to determine the duration of the course; in fact, the field in which the company operates is fundamental: productive, agricultural, nuclear and other companies commonly considered part of a highly risky field are part of the group A, that is to say the group to which the 16 hours course is assigned. By law, the attendance of the courses must be during the working hours and must not weigh economically on the workers, that after the course will be the medical aid operators of the company, thus becoming responsible in the cases in which it will be necessary.
The 12 hours courses are made for the companies that do not operate in the fields of the group A and do not exceed the number of workers; once the course, of 12 or 16 hours, is over, every three years there will be a refresher course to test the practical abilities in the medical aid intervention. Moreover, it is possible to attend a BLS course, “Basic Life Support”: thanks to this course the workers will be able to reanimate people who suffered a heart attack without any special means and, most of all, without being doctors.
In fac
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t, it’s a “lay” course, which means that it does not require special capabilities acquired with studies, but it gives a basic knowledge which gives the possibility to give the first medical aid to a person who suffered a heart attack until when the ambulance arrives, which in many cases is fundamental. Between the calling of the ambulance and its arrival, in fact, some minutes pass, and in those cases they are very important and long minutes; once the call is made, which should anyway be the first step, the medical aid mechanism is started up: detection, reporting, response, on scene care, care in transit, transfer to definitive care. These are the six phases of the medical aid, reminded in the Star of Life, international symbol of the medical aid, at the centre of which there’s the Rod of Asclepius, which since the Ancient Greece times represents medicine. They say that the symbol, which has a snake twisted on a stick, refers to an ancient technique used to extract the Dracunculus Medinensis, a common parasite in the ancient times, that was extracted by delicately twisting it on a stick. As far as Asclepius is concerned, he was Apollo’s son and was considered the god of medicine: they said that just by sleeping in his temple anyone could be healed by any disease.
