Students Safety Cadets (SSC)

Safety and First Aid - A course for college students

College students are a high risk group when it comes to accidents. In 2012, close to two thousand people in the age group 15-29 lost their lives in accidents in Kerala, most of them college students. For every accident leading to a death, there are many more living with lifelong disabilities, physical scars and mental trauma. In addition to the emotional and economical pressure this puts on the family, accidents prevent our youngsters from reaching their full potential, a tragedy for them and the society.

Many of the accidents and consequent deaths could be prevented by basic safety awareness and ability to respond to accidents in a professional manner. Safety awareness, first aid and training on basic life support are integral part of schooling around the world. However, these issues are not yet part of our education system. Consequently students in campuses are not even aware of basic aspects of first aid or emergency life support.

Help for Helpless has been working in emergency and trauma response over the past many years. We have come across hundreds of accidents involving college students and most of them ended up in tragedies for the families. It is this involvement which promoted H FOR H to design a training course specially targeting college students. This programme, titled ‘Safety and First Aid for College Students’ is a specially designed to create awareness on safety risks and provide life skills to deal with emergency situations. The session will cover the following topics;

  1. Typical Safety Risks for students on campus and off campus
  2. Basic life support
  3. First Aid for common incidents
  4. Personnel Protective Equipment
  5. Personal contingency planning

The overall session is for 3 hours (3 days) and includes lectures, case studies and demonstrations. The sessions will be conducted in an interactive manner, including opportunities for participants to get hands own experience. The classes will be taken by a team of experts which include doctors, safety professionals and first responders. There will be a question and answer session in the end.

H FOR H has already conducted safety and first aid training courses in a number of campuses, including Department of Bioinformatics, Kerala University, Sacred Heart College, Thevara, Ernakulam, Institute of Land and Disaster Management, National Institute of Technology (NIT), Calicut, Cochin University and Science and Technology, University of Calicut among others. In 2015, H FOR H is planning to conduct training courses in at least 50 campuses in Kerala, including major universities, engineering colleges and arts colleges.