Essential First-Aid Kit Items For Emergencies

Part of what makes medical emergencies so scary is that, by nature, they can happen completely unexpectedly. Ernest Grant, the immediate past president of the American Nurses Association and a leading expert in burn care, said one of the most common mistakes people make when it comes to stocking their at-home first aid kits is that they fail to keep it up to date, allowing the contents to expire and thus be less effective. Melanie Gibbons Hallman, an emergency nurse practitioner and an assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing, added that you should also be highly aware of things like age and existing health conditions of all of the people in your home in order to have the most effective kit. For example, “very small burns within the size of a quarter can be handled at home, as well as things like bug bites and small cuts once bleeding has been managed,” Grant said. Even though this might seem obvious to some, Grant said these can be among the most common non-life threatening visits that urgent care centers see, which might possibly have been managed at home with the correct materials.