RE: First Aid Kit Upfundme Week 14
Good to see the progress you're making with this project.
The emergency contraceptive pill reminded me to ask you about expiry dates on these items ... like are there any and will you have a rolling update my first aid supplies kit type programme?
I also wondered, and maybe you wrote this in a post long ago that I missed, how you are going to use the kit (apart from the obvious hehe). I mean, are you going to promote it as a good thing to have around, teach other people how to do it and why etc etc. You might not have any plans, and that's fine, but I was just thinking about the benefits of building a network of civil first aiders ... am I getting into prepper stuff here?
Your first aid supplies are much more comprehensive than what we would have as first aid supplies ... in a developed country with ... ahem ... a working health service and civil emergency plans in place. I think ours contain mainly things to staunch bleeding, aid resuscitation and that is about it. It is literally first aid!
Ah ha ha ha ha. Yeah. A lot of people won't seek treatment here because they can't afford it. Yay capitalist profits. /sarcasm The latest report I saw said even if you go, ours is the worst system as far as treatment goes among "developed" nations. There was some other UN report I think it was that said that really we're only "first world" if you have money, and we're "third world" if you don't, and I was like YEP. But I digress. So yeah, I got comprehensive with my kit.
There are expiration dates, but usually they're a few years out so I should be good for some time. I tried to balance what I ordered with "be prepared and have backup" and "don't order so much that it expires on you." Time will tell if I made good estimates on that score. :)
Nah, I think it's a fab idea. The next training that I want to find (but they're rare and you kinda gotta keep your ear to the ground) is street medic training. Basically anarchist first aid, that will teach you different things than Red Cross first aid does, like - how to treat tear gas. I've read a guide about that specific thing online (speaking of ...I still need to get the right kind of antacid for that. I didn't add it to the wishlist on Amazon because I could only find a few options of the right kind according to the guide and they were all absurdly priced. I recognized the brands as like, dollar store brands so I thought I would check there first), but I'm sure the training has much more. Given the police state we live in, also pertinent info to have. Then I also want to take wilderness first aid! REI (a local outdoorsy gear shop) offers classes for that, but they cost a couple hundred bucks and are usually in a wilderness setting for a weekend, so I have to figure out the logistics. Anyway, aside from packing my kit along any time I go to a protest and such, I didn't have any like, outreach plans at this point, but maybe eventually. Maybe once I've gotten some street medic training and experience, I can teach that too. We shall see. :)
Thank you for all your support and help building my kit! <3
Ah, so the kit would go to protests - that's a really valuable outcome already 😎
I was thinking about the UK - the NHS is fabulous for some things, really much more than you would expect, and then absolutely rubbish at other things. At the moment, after nine years of government mismanagement and costly, nonsense law-making it is struggling. Our civil emergency plans are very poor - flooding in winter in heavy rain, who would have thought? We've been lucky here, on the whole, some localised flooding, but a few years back, it was more serious and then it transpired that the local flood defences had been neglected for years, or development planning had been agreed on overflow ground ... like there was never a reason why those things had been put in place!
Yeah, from what I hear it sounds like they are trying to make the NHS less effective so that it can be privatized like the US's system, much the way that they are trying to make schools ever-worse here so they can be privatized into charter schools. It's all about the profit over the people, for those types.
Our emergency services are shit, too. FEMA, as you may have heard about with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and then again in Puerto Rico a year and a half ago or so - is doing less and less, as disasters become more and more. California is pretty much on fire all the damn time now. People are left to fend for themselves after hurricanes. Bridges and roads are literally collapsing. New Orleans is sinking.
I literally don't understand people who care more about their personal profits than the common good. Do they really need another million or two or twenty at the cost of people's lives? They don't, but they don't care. It's unfathomable when we're a species that is wired to band together socially for survival. How did this behavior not get rooted out thousands of years ago by evolution?