By Pierre Prince, Quebec Zone patroller (pierreprince300@gmail.com)
For three years, the Quebec Zone provided first aid services during summer activities at Patro Roc Amadour. This community organization is in the less-privileged Limoilou district of Quebec City. Its highly diverse clientele includes children aged four years and older, teenagers, young people with behavioural problems or intellectual disabilities (autism, Down’s syndrome, abuse, etc.). Some of them have recently immigrated and are in the process of obtaining a new status.
The interventions varied greatly: light traumas (muscle stretching, cuts, insect bites, light blows to the head, etc.) and medical cases (nausea, allergies, headaches, etc.). Although serious trauma occurrences were rare, Karine Bourgoin and Catherine Dussault did save the life of one child who suffered severe anaphylactic shock. Thanks to their rapid intervention, they saved his life. In fact, they received the John D. Harper Life Saving Award for their actions.
With children, the psychological approach remains very important. On a regular basis, our task was to distinguish between a health problem and a feeling of anxiety. It could be a child complaining of headaches or stomach pains because they weren’t happy at home or at the Patro. We used different strategies (questions, games, jokes, the counsellor’s cooperation, etc.) to establish contact and identify the source of the problem. For more complex behaviour cases, the “Escouade”, made up of specialist counsellors, took over.
We also had to communicate with parents who had little understanding of French or English. There were even times when I ran out of Spanish. Sometimes, after taking several steps or asking several questions, we learned to our astonishment that the child had recently arrived in Canada and had only known life in the refugee camps. His survival instinct, normally useful in these situations, led the child to resort to inappropriate means of self-defence or reactions to frustrations.
One day, for example, the overloaded “Escouade” called us to help them with a five-year-old girl who had been withdrawn from her group because she was behaving aggressively with the other children. After asking for some advice, I intervened twice with her. At first, she refused to talk and isolated herself in her corner. But with patience and while drawing with her, I managed to establish contact. The “Escouade” then took over to teach her how to assess her level of anger and manage it better. Two weeks later, I bumped into her on the playground. She recognized me and greeted me with a big smile. That was my pay for the day.
It was a rewarding experience and gave me a different kind of expertise in traumatic injuries. Last year, the Quebec Zone involvement was not renewed due to the lack of available patrollers. However, this example of social involvement suggests another way of applying our knowledge and expertise in an area different from our usual winter activities.
This post is also available in: French