Digitalisation of First Aid Education

"<< Background >>First Aid is, by its very nature, a practical skill that has traditionally been taught entirely in on-site, practical training. While practical exercise can never be substituted for hands-on skills of this type, complementing and improving on-site first aid training with digital elements has great potential to improve training and to make it more attractive. This is not only good for the partner organisations as education providers and their learners who receive more interesting courses. It is ultimately a benefit to public safety and society as such, if more people learn first aid.The partner organisations recognize this potential benefit and wanted to exchange experience and practices from different countries on how to tackle his issue and the challenges that come with it. To this end, several partner organisations shared and explained their practices in digital first aid training - failures as well as successes - with other organisations. Besides the organizations with such pre-existing experience, the project included many organisations that have yet to work on the challenge of digital elements in first aid education and who were interested in seeing which approaches and solutions exist and have proven themselves.<< Objectives >>The project aimed to, and did, conduct an exchange of best practices among first aid training organisations and training personnel. Besides the experience of the active exchange that was conducted in several best practice workshops, the project established a knowledge network on digitalization in first aid education that will revisit the issue continuously and stay available as a contact point for other parties interested in the project and its results.<< Implementation >>The project implemented three best practice workshops with a variety of digital teaching approaches demonstrated and discussed among the participants. These workshops took place in Latvia and at two Italian partners' facilities.A concluding event was held in Brussels, with the knowledge network on digitalization in first aid officially being formed.<< Results >>The project successfully conducted the envisioned exchange of best practices amongst the experts of the partner organisations. The presented practices are documented on the project website at https://digifirstaid.samaritan-international.eu/. The lessons learned for the participating organisations are also documented on the website.As DIGIFIRSTAID was a ""small scale"" project, the articles on the project website are the central and only public documentation of the results.The knowledge network on e-learning in first aid was integrated into the SAMARITAN INTERNATIONAL Competence Centre First Aid, which remains at the disposal of any parties interested in the project and will revisit the topic of digital first aid training and new developments in this field that concern the former project partners at its regular sessions."