INFORMATION AND ABILITY LEVEL OF CAPABILITY OF PEOPLE AFTER NATURAL DISEASTERS: WHAT CAN WE DO?

It is frightening to be faced with a person struggling for life and not to know to help that person. Many research studies have mentioned that first aid education is important to save lives of individuals, but first aid knowledge and skills are deficient in societies. Since events (heart diseases, traffic accidents, occupational accidents, natural disasters, unintentional injuries, terrorist attacks and war) that affect our lifes are unintentional and unexpected events, it would be better to equip as many people with essential life saving skills our society in order to decrease the number of deaths and injuries. Thousands of people die and many more suffer from emergency conditions due to insufficient and timely first aid. It takes very short time (only three to four minutes) for a blocked airway to cause someone’s death, but it can take more than eight minutes for an ambulance to arrive on the scene. The period between the time of emergency event and the arrival of the professional help is very important to discriminate between the life and death. First aid subject should be handled as a separate and practical course through all life, not as a theoretical module of a health care related course. The purposes of this study to discuss a) to contribute the studies about first aid knowledge and skills that were done in the World and Turkey, b) to detect the deficiency in first aid after natural diseasters and c) what can we do to meet this deficit