Israel is upgrading India’s first-responder skills to save lives during emergencies

Israel is upgrading India’s first-responder skills to save lives during emergencies, natural disasters and accidents.

The Israeli National Emergency Medical Service, MDA-Magen David Adom (Hebrew for Red Star of David) and the Indian Red Cross Society (IRCS) are holding a joint project to train volunteers, including school kids, in first-aid.

Red Star of David is known to have a response time of less than 10 minutes and uses volunteers, including school kids, as first responders in case of emergencies.

This collaboration is in line with IRCS’ effort to upgrade its overall capacity in community-based first aid, including through international partnerships.

Under the joint program, chief trainers form Magen Adom are holding a special training workshop, with trainers from IRCS, on community basis first aid, introducing them methods and techniques that were developed and are practiced in Israel, and together adapting them to meet local needs.

“This mission between India and Israel is an initiative to train the community in providing first aid during emergencies, natural disasters and accidents and to teach life-saving skills that will save precious lives,” said Dr Vanshree Singh, director, IRCS blood bank.

“It’s a day-long training programme and once the candidates are assessed by experts from Israel, they get master trainer certificate that makes them eligible to train their peers. The volunteers are neither doctors, nurses nor paramedics rather laypersons; we call them lay lecturers.”

Volunteers are trained in bandaging wounds, stopping bleeding, cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR), including CPR in babies, hand washing, laws of first-aid etc. “The situations that these trainers can aptly handle include burns, bruises, drowning, person losing consciousness, fainting, nose bleed, snake bite, fracture, heart attack and stroke,” says Dr Singh.

Indian Red Cross started this exercise of training common people in 2016, and in such short span of time they have received an overwhelming response.

“We get huge number of applications from states, but we carefully select people fit enough to be trained for the course. We have certain criteria that we follow,” she said.