10 Responsibilities of a First Aider

First aiders are commonplace in the majority of businesses, serving an important role as first responders to all kinds of medical situations and providing immediate, stabilising support in situations where more serious medical attention is required. The role varies a lot depending on who you are and where you work, so understanding the responsibilities of a first aider in the workplace can be tricky if you’re new to it.

Whilst the primary objective of first aid is to preserve life, there are plenty of other responsibilities necessary to fulfil the role. In this article, we explain the main ten responsibilities of a first aider and explore how each of these might be put into practice.

What Are the Responsibilities of a First Aider?

Assess the Situation

The first responsibility of any first aider is to assess situations you arrive at in order to determine whether first aid is needed. Whether you’re asked to come and respond to an incident or someone ends up needing first aid when you’re around, the very first thing that the role requires of you is to take stock of the situation.

Assessing a situation where the duties of a first aider may be needed involves asking for information (if possible) but also visually analysing a situation and making decisions. In most cases, this will involve figuring out what has happened, who has been hurt and how hurt they might be. A first aider will then decide what action is needed immediately to respond.

Protect Yourself

One of the most important first aider responsibilities is that you have a duty to protect yourself before anyone else. Helping others is obviously one of the main functions of the role, but this should never be done if it’s going to put you at risk as well.

Protecting yourself as a first aider begins when you assess the situation, which should involve determining whether it is safe for you to enter or engage with what has happened. If there are still risks present then it doesn’t matter if people involved might need help; if you become hurt as well then you will also need help which will actually make the outcome of the situation worse.

A lot of protecting yourself in the role of a first aider comes from awareness, both outward and being aware of your own capabilities. But it also involves understanding how to keep yourself safe from potential infection or contamination by using appropriate first aid equipment and practising good hygiene where possible.

Staying protected as a first aider also means only taking action within your means. You should understand the limits of what you can do as a first aider and what should be left to more experienced and qualified medical professionals, which will also protect you from trying to engage in situations where you might end up at risk.

Protect Others

After your responsibility to protect yourself before and during administering first aid, another of the roles and responsibilities of a qualified first aider is to protect others. After assessing the situation and determining where the risk or harm has come from, it should be a priority to stop other people from also becoming injured. 

Within the responsibility of protecting others also comes protecting the injured person or people from further harm. Keeping yourself safe is a priority, but the point of first aid is to stop situations from escalating and causing more damage where possible, so this is a really important part of the role. Protecting the injured person might just involve administering basic first aid, or it might involve getting help from a professional.

Prevent the Spread of Infection

Another of the key responsibilities of a first aider is to prevent the spread of infection through their actions. This primarily concerns situations where an injured person has an open wound, but can also apply to scenarios where the people involved may be carrying other infectious diseases.

The best and main way to prevent the spread of infection as a first aider is to ensure your hands are clean and sterilised before administering any first aid. You should wear surgical gloves where possible or cover your hand with a clean plastic bag if you need to touch and dress a wound. If neither of these is available, you can ask the injured person to clean and dress the wound themselves if they are able.

Provide Reassurance

Taking care of others involves providing reassurance, and as a first aider, you should aim to be a reassuring presence. The way that you approach this will vary depending on whether you know the person or people you are giving first aid to, but the overall intention should be the same.

Providing reassurance involves keeping a calm demeanour throughout and encouraging the injured person to remain calm. You should introduce yourself when you approach if they are conscious and make sure that you explain what you’re doing throughout your interaction. If you do something like touch or move them, you should ask for permission first.

Everyone involved in a first aid incident should be treated with dignity and respect at all times. If a crowd has gathered, the injured person might feel more comfortable if you ask onlookers to disperse to give them more privacy.

Assess and Monitor the Casualty

After assessing the situation, reducing the first of further problems and introducing yourself, one of the main duties of a first aider is to assess and monitor the casualty. Before you decide whether you can and should administer first aid, you should fully assess the person or people involved.

If the injured people are conscious, ask them what has happened and get them to explain where they are hurt or need help. If the casualty is unconscious or unresponsive, you can use the DRS ABC acronym to run through the steps you should take to assess the situation.

There may be some first aid scenarios where you need to take action quickly and where this assessment will have to be done rapidly, potentially as you are also assessing the area for risks and getting other people out of harm’s way. Many first aid scenarios, especially those in the workplace, are not that serious and therefore can involve conversation with the casualty, but in some you might not have the luxury of being able to talk through what has happened.

Monitoring a casualty, either until additional help arrives or just to keep an eye on their situation, is another important responsibility of a first aider. Whether you’re keeping an eye on someone’s pulse or responsiveness whilst waiting for an ambulance or just checking how someone is feeling every hour until they go home from work, monitoring helps other medical professionals to step in as soon as they arrive and also means that an injured person won’t suddenly deteriorate without being noticed.

Provide First Aid

Of course, the primary responsibility of a first aider is to provide first aid. This could range from cleaning and putting a plaster on a small wound to giving CPR to the seriously injured casualty until an ambulance arrives.

If you’re a workplace first aider then the majority of your role will be spent dealing with incidents on the minor end of the scale. But you still need to know how to administer first aid in more serious situations, such as choking, bleeding, seizures and unconsciousness, in case these scenarios do arise.

Providing first aid is one of the legal responsibilities of a first aider because they have a duty of care to others, but this only applies if you feel confident administering the first aid that is needed. If you think a situation is more serious than you can handle, or you can’t quite remember how to respond to a type of injury, the best thing to do is call for help and wait for someone more qualified to arrive. This may feel counterintuitive, but it prevents you from accidentally causing more harm.

Arrange Additional Help

A priority of first aid is stabilising a situation until proper help arrives. As a first aider, you are responsible for deciding whether more professional medical intervention is needed and then organising this so that the casualty gets the help that they need.

In many cases, arranging additional help involves calling an ambulance and waiting for paramedics to arrive. But you might also decide that someone should be sent to A&E or needs to make a doctor's appointment if their injuries aren’t life-threatening but still require urgent attention. What matters is that you can stabilise the situation in the moment but then assess whether more medical help is needed and arrange this as quickly as possible.

Record First Aid Incidents

As part of health and safety legislation, first aid incidents need to be recorded and kept as a way of monitoring risk and ensuring that businesses are doing what they can to keep employees safe. If a first aid incident happens at your place of work then you need to record this by writing up what happened, what caused the incident and what was done to deal with it.

Recording first aid incidents can help to identify patterns where similar injuries or incidents keep happening, helping to highlight where more preventative measures need to be put in place. They can also be used as evidence, either if an employee tries to make a claim for an injury or if you need to prove the health and safety measures that your business is taking.

Keep Training Up to Date

Finally, an important responsibility of a first aider is to keep all of your training up to date. This is incredibly important as, even if you’re not learning anything new, it refreshes the information in your brain and means that when you need to respond to a situation, you’ll have all the skills of a first aider ready and waiting to be applied.

Your employer might be responsible for actually organising and paying for first aid refresher courses, but you should also be aware of where your knowledge may be lacking and when you could use a refresher course. This ensures that you can carry out all of the roles and responsibilities of a qualified first aider without issue, keeping the people around you as safe as possible.

FAQs

Are the responsibilities of a first aider different from a nurse?

Nurses are much more qualified medical professionals than first aiders, so their responsibilities are different. Whilst a first aider is just responsible for dealing with minor incidents or preserving life until more help arrives, nurses have much more responsibility for their patients and are capable of administering much more complex treatments. 

What is the most important consideration when providing first aid?

The most important consideration when providing first aid is to keep yourself safe first. This involves assessing the environment before you enter it so that you don’t also become injured and also understanding your limits and skills as a first aider and not engaging in anything that might put you or another person at risk.

What should you do for yourself when administering first aid?

When you’re administering first aid you should take the necessary precautions to keep yourself safe. This means using appropriate PPE to prevent the risk of infection, but also not engaging in situations where you might also become injured and then require medical attention yourself. 

Summary

The roles and responsibilities of a qualified first aider are quite extensive, as there are all kinds of medical scenarios that you might encounter and have to deal with. Understanding your main responsibilities is important because it underpins everything that you do and can be a really helpful reference point when it comes to making decisions.

If you’re a first aider wanting to better understand your role, or you’re looking for training to set you on the path to being a first aider, our ‘Online First Aid at Work Course’ is a great digital resource to get started with.