Tag: workplace safety

What Will You Learn In a First Responder Course?

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What Will You Learn In a First Responder Course?

A first responder is a person who, in an emergency event, runs toward it instead of running away. First responders are the brave people out there on the front lines helping to save lives.

To be considered a first responder, all you really have to do is fall into that category who literally is the first to respond to a scene.

However, a certified first responder is someone who is able to provide advanced medical care, including first aid, CPR, and AED – the automated external defibrillator. A certified first responder is the lowest level of the emergency medical service team.

F.A.S.T. Rescue is a Red Cross authorized provider and can train you to become an emergency medical responder in a course designed for firefighters, EMS (emergency care instructor), and police. To become a certified first responder you must finish a course approved by your province.

What to Expect

In the class you will learn exactly what to do when faced with an emergency situation. The first responder class is a 40 hour class with flexible options for creating a schedule. When you complete the course, the certification is valid for three years. Different provinces or territories may have different types of rules and regulations in their courses, and yours will be adjusted accordingly to where you live.

The course takes about three weeks to take for full time students learning at an accelerated pace. If the student is taking the course part time it can take anywhere from eight to eleven weeks.

You will go through five parts of the course, all designed for caring for injuries and sustaining life until the higher level medical personnel arrives on the scene. Essentially, everything you are learning is designed to be pre-hospital care. The course includes CPR, HCP, and AED.

The course content in part one includes how to assess the emergency scene, and how to prevent transmission of disease.

In part two you move on to the anatomy and physiology section, where you’ll learn how to handle respiratory emergencies and how to deal with airway and ventilation issues. Circulation, bleeding, and shock are also gone over.

Part three focuses on how to respond to traumatic injuries such as head and spine injuries, soft tissue injuries, musculoskeletal injuries, and others.

When you get to part four you’ll learn how to treat sudden illnesses, and what do do in the case of poisoning. You’ll also go over how to handle heat related emergencies like heat stroke, or cold related emergencies like hypothermia.

The final part of the course instructs on special situations. These include incidents that may involve multiple casualties, transportation emergencies, or moving a patient. It also goes over what to do in the case of emergency childbirth and crisis intervention.

At the end of the course, you will take a certification exam. You pass the test if you score 80% or greater.

Get trained to save people’s lives today and take your course with F.A.S.T. Rescue.

Protective Wear, What Do You Need It For Anyway?

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Protective Wear, What Do You Need It For Anyway?

If you’ve ever worked in an industry where you need protective gear to be able to conduct your job, you know that it’s of vital importance. You can get written up for not wearing the proper safety gear, and if employees fail to wear the proper protection, potentially not survive an audit. Most importantly, you might be injured on the job if you fail to wear the proper protection.

People with regular desk jobs mostly have to worry about paper cuts or carpal tunnel syndrome, but you have to worry about life and death burns, hand protection, and eye protection.

Personal protective equipment is called PPE, and it’s required for workplaces that work with hazardous materials, fire, welding, and more.

Eye Protection

These aren’t just your regular sunglasses. Eye protection in professional fields means heavy duty protective gear that might actually prevent you from going blind. It’s an important safety precaution that your goggles fit tightly, so they don’t slip off by accident and expose your eyes to danger.

Welding goggles help you be able to withstand the heat of the products you’re working with and still be able to clearly see what you’re working on. They’re super flexible and durable, because when welding your gear tends to take a lot of wear and tear.

Other professions like chemistry, food, construction, and others, may need goggles in order to protect the eyes. It’s also necessary to have cleaning solution on hand so that vision is never restricted due to cloudy eyewear.

Fire Retardant Clothing

Fire retardant clothing is just that – it helps protect individuals from their clothing catching on fire. It usually comes in a jumpsuit form for the employee to wear, or a jacket that they can put on when needed.

The clothes are made out of industrial strength PVC and Polyester. They are usually worn at construction sites, chemical refineries, or oil and gas companies.

Gloves

You use gloves around your kitchen, but there’s a huge number of different gloves out there that you can use and are needed for various industries.

Mechanic gloves help keep their hands safe when working with heavy duty equipment and can increase the traction of a grip. Ski gloves, welders gloves, and lineman’s gloves are all examples of industry specific gloves that workplaces require.

Disposable gloves are important when working with food so that there is no contamination. Clean room gloves have much the same concept in mind, but when it comes to making electronic components instead.

Hearing Protection

It is required that employees who are exposed to noise in their workplace the exceeds 85 decibels wear hearing protection.

Hearing protection can come in the form of earplugs or ear muffs. Earplugs are used for lower noise environments that still require them, while ear muffs are necessary for areas with higher volumes of noise like construction. Air traffic controllers and factory workers also require strong hearing protection.

Masks

Facemasks and personal respirators are needed for people with jobs that deal with toxic chemicals or work that produces small fibers that would be dangerous to breath in, like carpentry.

The face mask category can range from dental face masks to gas masks, sometimes called a full face piece. An N95 masks protects the wearer against liquid or solid particles that may be dangerous to breathe.

Face pieces can lock into place to give lateral and frontal protection to the wearer against the hazards they may be working with. They attach to headgear or a bracket, and literally allow you to get your head in the game without fearing for your safety.

If you’re in need of safety gear, F.A.S.T. can be your one-stop shop for everything you require to stay safe and sound. They have all of this protective wear and more available for you to finally get some peace of mind.

All of the gear is certified by the labour boards in every workplace and business that they’re necessary for use in. Committed to health and safety supplies, you’re being well taken care of when you choose to put your safety in the hands of F.A.S.T.

CPR Ten Years Ago vs. CPR Today: What’s Changed

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CPR Ten Years Ago vs. CPR Today: What’s Changed

If you took a CPR class any time in the last ten years, well, it’s time to take it again. The methods that you thought you knew have changed. And they’ve changed almost completely.

The guidelines are updated once every five years, which means that they’ve gone through two major revisions in a decade.

Psst – if you don’t know what CPR actually stands for, it’s cardiopulmonary resuscitation, which was introduced in 1960. Since then, and since 2010, it’s been evolving to be the most effective rescue method that it can be.

No Giving Up

In the past, CPR was thought to be useless once the patient reached a certain point past the possibility to be revived. However, cases where a patient was recovered after long periods of CPR – one being 96 minutes – turned this notion on its head.

Now CPR is encouraged to be administered until a medical professional arrives and can take over the job. Chest compressions keep the blood flowing to a patient’s brain, which can increase their probability of survival no matter how long it’s taking for help to arrive.

Goodbye, Rescue Breaths

When you think of CPR, you probably visualize someone either doing chest compressions or performing mouth to mouth resuscitation. However, rescue breaths are no longer taught when showing someone how to deliver CPR to a patient.

Take this info with a grain of salt – medical professionals and people with advanced certifications still do perform mouth to mouth, but the American Health Association deemed it less useful for non-medical professionals to perform the procedure. Chest compressions are more important in keeping the patients alive, so the attention is now focused on teaching this method alone.

People without professional medical training have been proven more likely to remember CPR steps during an emergency if they were as simplified as possible. Focusing just on chest compressions increases the patient’s chances of surviving, eliminates worry about transferring disease, and helps get rid of potential error in CPR performance.

No More “Look, Listen, and Feel”

At one point, CPR training included telling students to stop and assess the victim by checking for breath and feeling to see if there’s a problem. Now, they’ve determined it’s pretty much obvious when someone needs CPR to be performed on them, and precious seconds are wasted during the old method. Now, students are told to call 911 as soon as they realize there’s a problem, and start administering CPR as quickly as possible.

A Change of Steps

Old CPR guidelines dictated that students follow A-B-C steps in the order of clearing the patient’s airway, giving rescue breaths, and then delivering chest compressions. Airway, breaths, compression – A-B-C.

Now, there’s essentially just C – but the other steps still apply in a minor way, if the student is more versed in CPR and the steps are applicable. Now, the steps could be seen as C-A-B, with breaths being the least important step.

An Updated Ratio

About a decade ago, it was taught that for every two breaths students should administer fifteen compressions. Now, the ratio is taught as two breaths for every 30 compressions, if breaths are used at all. This increases the emphasis on chest compressions and takes it away from breathing. Compressions are what circulates the victim’s blood flow to the brain, which is what keeps them alive.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Old guidelines stipulated that students push about one and a half two inches for each compression on the victim’s chest. Now, it’s recommended that the student push two inches at least, if not more. The worry that resulted in the old guidelines less vigorous compressions was that the victim’s ribs might break, but now it’s determined that harder compressions could save a victim’s life, even if some of their ribs are broken.

100 compressions per minute or more are now recommended to be delivered to a victim, whereas before it was about 100 or less.

Obviously, you need to refresh your CPR skills. Luckily, you can do so easily with CPR classes from FAST Rescue.

Working at Heights: Safety Tips for a Dangerous Job

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Working at Heights: Safety Tips for a Dangerous Job

Working at heights is literally as it sounds: when you see construction crews on high level buildings, they’re working at heights. It’s working from anywhere that a fall could be considered debilitating. Thought your office job was stressful? Imagine having to worry about falling every time you take a step. Continue reading Working at Heights: Safety Tips for a Dangerous Job

Think You Don’t Need Health And Safety Consulting? Think Again

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Think You Don’t Need Health And Safety Consulting? Think Again

Perhaps you’ve been running a business or are an employee at a company thinking, nah, I don’t need a health and safety program. But then the unexpected day comes, and someone comes to audit your workplace, or an employee notices something that doesn’t measure up to guidelines.

It’s important to perform your own health and safety audits for your company so that you don’t fall short if any outside source examines your program and you have to face the repercussions.

What is A Health and Safety Audit?

Depending on your type of business, the parameters for a health and safety audit can differ.

Audits themselves are designed to assess the effectiveness of the safety plans and programs that you have in place. They make sure that your procedures, like inspection forms and safety materials, are completely up to date and still as accurate as possible.

More often than not, your audit will be voluntary to make sure that your workplace is protecting you well. But sometimes, a ministry of labor auditor can arrive and evaluate the procedures of your company.

Audits allow a company to determine the how to improve their employee’s safety, if necessary. They take into account the factors that are working well and which factors aren’t.

You can post your audit results for everyone to view once you’ve finished with the auditing process. Employee happiness can increase when they know exactly what a company is doing in order to ensure that they’re being kept as safe and healthy as possible.

If your company ends up being reviewed, can you prove your due diligence? You won’t want to answer no to this question – it could result in penalties like revoking licenses or stopping operations until the assessed problems are resolved.

What a Health and Safety Consultation Can Do For You

When your company is up to code, your staff or fellow employees can rest much easier knowing that there’s a well inspected code that’s up to standard in the workplace. Management is also protecting itself from liability.

Once you’ve proved how much you care about implementing a code that’s up to date, overall confidence in staff and management will increase as well. You’re helping to eliminate any penalties you might have incurred from a safety infringement.

When you go through your health and safety procedures and assess their effectiveness, you’re also streamlining the process. You can increase efficiency of your operations when you go over them with a fine toothed comb.

Why Consulting Helps Prepare You

Preparing for a health and safety audit or performing one yourself can be a wholly overwhelming process.

It’s hard to do on your own, so you can hire a professional to help you. Our occupational health and safety program will carefully assess your company’s legal requirements, then look at the program you have in place to see if it matches up.

We’ll let you know what the gaps are in your system, and take any corrective actions that need to be taken. We’ll show you how to implement them, ensuring your company is completely up to standard.

We go through emergency response programs, traffic management audits, site inspections, workplace investigations, and many more with expert knowledge that you may not have. Get a consultation today and set your mind at ease.

Don’t Be This Guy, Let Us Help You

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Don’t Be This Guy, Let Us Help You

Would you like to cost your company $60,000 by failing to comply with safety orders? Probably not, right?

One coffee shop operator in Stittsville, Ontario, did just that in 2017. In response to an incident, a inspector visited the shop – all pretty routine.

When the inspector visited the shop, he realized that a few of the shop’s safety standards weren’t quite up to code. Unfortunate, but again, not all-together unusual or out of place. Continue reading Don’t Be This Guy, Let Us Help You