Learn What To Do If Someone Is Choking
Twenty minutes of watching and practising, and you'll know what to do in the situation everyone panics in.
- Cost
- Free
- Time
- 30 min
- People
- Solo / Duo, Small Group (3-6), Large Group (7+)
- Where
- Home, Anywhere
- Bring
- Nothing in particular
Why this matters
Choking kills within minutes and almost always happens at home or in a restaurant, where the only people present are whoever's at the table. The correct response is simple and learnable in twenty minutes, but most people either freeze or do the wrong thing entirely. It's one of the highest-value pieces of knowledge relative to how long it takes to acquire.
How to do it
Watch an official demonstration from a recognised body - the Red Cross, St John Ambulance, or your national health service. Twenty minutes on a reputable video is genuinely enough to know the sequence, though a hands-on course is better.
What you're learning: - How to tell mild from severe. If they can cough, speak or breathe, encourage coughing and don't intervene. If they can't, act immediately. - Back blows and abdominal thrusts, and the order to do them in - What to do if the person becomes unconscious - When to call emergency services - which is early, not as a last resort
Critically, the technique differs for babies, small children, pregnant people and larger adults. Watch the version relevant to whoever you're actually around. The infant technique is completely different from the adult one and getting it wrong causes serious harm.
Also worth knowing: anyone who has received abdominal thrusts should be checked by a doctor afterwards, even if they seem fine. Internal injury is possible.
Do it as a group over dinner. It takes twenty minutes, you can practise the positioning on each other without applying force, and having several people in a household who know it matters much more than one.
Refresh it annually. This is knowledge that decays quietly.