RE: Media enquiry - accidents
by: Annie - 13-10-08 01:04
Dear Carrie,
I've not had my nursery for 2 years now but still fascinated by nursery life! As far as accidents are concerned I always stressed that prevention is the key and this could only be done via good organisation, planning, risk assessment, observation and evaluation. But we all know that children can defeat any system and so whenever this happened, all the staff foillowed the same procedure. They were sympathetic and made reassuring comments, dealt with the child immediately The first aid measures usually involved a clean white face flannel, held under cold water and applied to the small e.g. graize. The child was always comforted and the funny thing was that even the youngest children often role played the 'emergency' with either themselves or with dolls.
When I first opened the nursery, my colleague and I were concerned at the sometimes ridiculous reports staff wrote in the accident book. I recall that whenever a more serious 'bump' had occured , staff somehow felt a great compulsion to detail the form of the cold compress that had been applied. One twit wrote ' frozen sausage applied'.
In that first year a child broke her arm in the nursery. The climbing frame had been put out and there were five staff present to about fourteen children but not one member of staff knew exactly what had happened because they all had their back turned to the climbing frame whilst they cut our art work! Needless to say I had the whole incident investigated and that sort of preventable accident was never repeated. I ensured thorough training of staff, checked procedures and evaluated any near misses. In this way we maintained a very safe nursery!
Accidents need to be evaluated if they are to be kept to a minimum and so we even went to the lengths of having our own accident books printed and including evaluation sheets. openedusing the same firsybehaved