Cold Stress or Heat Illness Prevention?
- Cold Stress. The page you are on. Hypothermia, frostbite, trench foot, layering, warm up schedules and cold injury first aid.
- Heat Illness Prevention. The summer counterpart: heat exhaustion, heat stroke, hydration and acclimatisation. View the Heat Illness Prevention
- Safety Awareness for New Employees. The general hazard grounding for workers in their first weeks on a site. View the Safety Awareness for New Employees
- Developing a Health and Safety Plan. The written programme a cold stress prevention plan sits inside. View the Developing a Health and Safety Plan
Run cold stress before winter and heat illness before summer.
What Goes Wrong in Cold Stress First Aid?
The cold injury first aid a course has to teach is mostly a list of things not to do, because the instincts are wrong and some of them are dangerous.
- Warm the core first. Warmth goes to the chest, neck, armpits and groin before the arms and legs, because warming the limbs first can push cold blood back toward the heart.
- Do not rub frostbite. Frostbitten skin is never rubbed, because the ice crystals in the tissue cause further damage. Rewarming is done in warm water or with body heat, and not if there is any chance of refreezing.
- No direct heat, no alcohol. Heating pads and hot water cause burns on numb skin, and alcohol widens blood vessels and speeds heat loss, so neither belongs anywhere near a cold casualty.
- Do not assume the worst. Severe hypothermia can look like death, and the course teaches the emergency medicine line that goes with it: nobody is dead until they are warm and dead.
Every one of these is easy to get wrong under pressure, which is why the course drills them as do and do not lists rather than as prose.
This course was very informative.