First Aid Agency / Equipment

The room, and what happens after

Privacy, cleaning and getting the ambulance in.

Arrangements usually stop at treatment and the practical requirements continue. Somebody needs a private place to be treated or to recover, and treating a person in an open office is both clinically worse and undignified.

Access for the ambulance is a logistics problem that should be solved in advance: which entrance, who meets them, whether a lift is large enough for a stretcher, and who holds the keys to the barrier.

Cleaning up afterwards involves body fluids and there is a right way to do it, with the correct equipment and disposal. Staff who are asked to do it without either are being exposed unnecessarily.

Somebody should also take care of the witnesses. People who watched a serious incident, and particularly the responder, are affected by it and are routinely left to resume work as though nothing happened.

Where the person is taken to hospital, somebody needs to notify family or an emergency contact, and the organisation should know in advance where that information is held and who is authorised to use it.

The other post-incident arrangement worth having in advance is who speaks to other staff. An incident becomes known within minutes and an organisation that says nothing leaves colleagues to speculate, frequently incorrectly, about somebody they know.