Using accident injury data to assess the impact of community first aid training

In a U.K. First Aid Community Training Project from a town with a population of around 19,000 over 1200 people took a 4-h emergency first aid course. Independent evidence for the effects of the training was obtained from hospital casualty registers and from police road traffic accident data. The data indicated that the first aid training significantly reduced the accident injury rate in the community. Age, sex and accident location effects are discussed with reference to the disaggregated empirical data. It is argued that there are substantial indirect effects from the training, particularly the influence of first aid-trained adults upon children, as well as direct effects upon trained individuals shown by earlier studies.