All day care professionals must be trained in CPR. Even your assistants should have training. Infant and child CPR classes are easy to attend when they come to you, and if you work with the right training professional, he or she will come to your childcare center and train and certify your employees. This includes those who speak another language. A bilingual trainer can teach English and Spanish CPR classes. Here are five other reasons why CPR certification is so important in childcare services.
1. Choking
No matter how careful your staff it is, children can still find things to put into their mouths. Should a child begin choking on something, CPR may be in order to resuscitate the little one. If caught in time, the worst the child may suffer is coughing. If not, the child may stop breathing and his or her heart may stop beating, causing cardiac arrest and death.
2. Electrical Shock
You have covers over all of your plugs in all of your classrooms and play areas, but kids can still find ways to come in touch with electricity. Electrical shock is a serious injury that, in some cases, can immediately stop a heartbeat. Provided all of your staff has completed infant and child CPR classes, one of them can perform CPR until the emergency medical personnel arrived.
3. Head Trauma or Serious Injury
If a child suffers from head trauma or a serious injury, he or she may go into shock or worse. Sometimes head trauma results from an accidental fall; other times, it might be that the child was pushed. Any serious injury can result in cardiac arrest, and you need to begin CPR immediately to reduce the chances of the child dying while awaiting the help of emergency medical personnel.
4. Poisoning
Kids are naturally curious, and they will get into anything. Even if you keep your cleaning chemicals and other dangerous items, such as rat poison, out of their reach, you must be prepared in the event a child ingests poison while under your care. Of course the first thing you will do is contact the Poison Control Center and emergency medical personnel, but you may also be required to perform CPR.
5. Suffocation
Finally, suffocation can be caused by many different things. A child may put a plastic bag over his or her head that he or she somehow found. Perhaps he or she got tangled up in a cord or had another child wrap something around his or her neck thinking it was fun. Or, as discussed previously above, the child may choke on something. Any time the brain is starved its oxygen it begins to die.
All of these reasons are why CPR is so critical in emergency medical care, and the same holds true in childcare. Make certain your staff knows how to administer CPR properly in the event one of the children under your care faces an emergency situation. If you have anyone on your employment roster that is not properly certified, enroll them in infant and child CPR classes today.
