Baby Talk: First Aid for Babies and Infants

Courses to give you confidence and a guide to an essentials first aid kit for the home

A primal instinct for any mother is to protect and keep their children safe. You’ve probably done a little reading around first aid and have more than likely seen the adverts and videos with a step-by-step guide on how to perform CPR on your infant or assist them if/when they’re choking. But you’ve unlikely put these techniques in to practice and you hope to god that you never have to.

It’s one thing to be aware of how to perform first aid, but quite another to actually do it. You want to ensure that you know exactly what to do, with which techniques to use in a high-pressure situation to give your child the best chance of survival. We don’t want to scaremonger, we just want to prepare you.

The best way to know what to do in an emergency situation, is to practice it. However, it’s not something you can or should do on a well person. So, participating in a course, and doing so every few years or as and when your circumstances change for a refresher, is the best thing to do.

Participating in a first aid course will help you to feel more comfortable and confident that when faced with an emergency situation, you’ll have the tools necessary to help your children until help arrives.

Baby first aid courses- first aid for newborns and infants

By participating in a baby first aid course, you’ll learn how to determine if your baby is unresponsive, the correct recovery position and essentially, how to perform CPR on your baby.

You’ll also be given advise around fevers, rashes and suspected meningitis, choking, croup and what to do if your child bumps their head and/or is bleeding.

This is a thorough class that’ll give you lots of tools in first aid for up to the first 12 months of your baby’s life.

There are lots of free resources on the St John Ambulance website, with tutorial videos and step-by-step guides but nothing beats some first-hand experience like a course. We’ve included some of the key instructional videos for you to watch below:

How to perform CPR on your baby

What to do if your baby is choking

How to put your baby into the recovery position

What to do if your baby has a fever

The at-home essentials first aid kit

It’s a great idea to put together an essentials first aid kit in the home so that you have the resources to hand for any accident or illness. We spoke to the team at St John Ambulance to find out what you need to keep in stock at home in case of emergency.

The essentials

• Thermometer suitable for babies to allow you to check their temperature
• Painkillers for the family and some specific for your baby and infants
• Plasters- to protect open wounds, it’s best to prepare with an array of sizes
• Sterile wound dressing- larger cloth with a bandage for large cuts and wounds to help apply pressure and to help stop bleeding
• Roller bandages- to support join injuries, hold dressings and to apply pressure to wounds to help stop the bleeding
• Disposable gloves- to reduce the risk of infection
• Cleansing wipes- to help clean wounds before dressing them
• Gauze pads- which can be used for dressing or cleaning wounds
• Sticky tape- to hold dressings in place
• Pins/clips- to fasten loose bandages
• Scissors, shears and/or tweezers- to cut pads, bandages and/or tape to length.

We hope this has been a helpful introductory guide to first aid for your children. If it’s of interest, St John Ambulance also offer first aid courses for all which will not only equip you with some of the essential tools to help your infants but will give you further tools and techniques to help anyone of any age.

We’d like to thank St John Ambulance for sharing their resources with us.