How to Perform First Aid for Seizures

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Chip, and I am a paramedic instructor for the state of North Carolina, and I am here today to talk a little bit about how to perform basic first-aid for a person having a seizure. Hopefully we have called 911 as soon as you have realized someone was having a seizure. However what you can do while you are waiting for EMS professionals to arrive is a couple of things. Number one make sure the patient is not going to hurt themselves any further. If there is furniture around, chairs, tables things like that we can move those away from the patient, especially if it is a full body shaking type seizure activity. If you have something soft such as a towel, a blanket, a coat, and while they are seizing you if you could gently put it under their head so their head is not hitting the ground too hard again that is going to help preventing any secondary injuries during the seizure activity. We need to make sure that we don't lift the head too high, because we can close off the airway when we do that. Once the patient stops the actually seizure activity we need to make sure the patient is breathing. Hopefully you have had a CPR class if not I would definitely recommend that you go get certified in basic CPR. And once the seizure activity stops you want to take, and make sure the patient begins to breathe, because oftentimes when someone is seizing they are not breathing at that time. But hopefully when the seizure ends they will start breathing on their own. If they don't we need to assist them by breathing for them, which is another topic altogether. What we are going to do is once they have stop we want to go and keep them warm, cover them up with a blanket or sheet, try to give them as much privacy as possible, especially if you are in a public area. Continue to monitor their breathing as we go, again wait for EMS. Verify that someone has called 911, and for seizure activity if it starts again we just want to make sure that we back up, and don't allow anyone to get in the way or any object to hit the patient or the patient hitting the objects. One thing you want to be careful of is putting something in their mouth. It use to be that you could put a bite stick or something in there, however if there is a great chance that they could actually swallow that or get it stuck in their airway and make them stop breathing, and cause an airway obstruction. So make sure we don't put anything in the mouth during that time at all. If someone wants to do that again just recommend they don't, because often times if they relax their jaw that bite stick or other object could fall in there in the back of the throat, and we will have a whole other problem that is quite a bit more challenging to take care. And this has been basic first-aid for treatment of a seizure."