St. John Ambulance Alberta - Child Safety Seat Program?

**shauburg** · 03-01-2010, 03:22 PM

St. John Ambulance Alberta now has a Community Services newsletter. Their Jan issue had a section on their "Child Safety Seat Program" - http://www.sja.ca/Alberta/CommunityS...yServices.aspx

Child Safety Seat Program

St. John will be offering child safety seat information sessions free of charge
to parents/caregivers through community services trained volunteer facilitators.

The program will be phased in at selected SJA Centres throughout 2010.
All selected volunteers will be trained to the CRS Technician level (2 1/2 day course).

Further information and Centre roll-out dates will be provided in the next edition of this newsletter.

Has anyone else heard about this? Is anyone volunteering for this?

**Car-Seat.Org** · 03-01-2010 03:22 PM

**Shanora** · 03-01-2010, 03:52 PM

Uh I have not....but I'm intrigued! LOL

**hipmaman** · 03-01-2010, 03:56 PM

Does it mean 2 different kinds of training in the message? I read as:
- training for parents and caregivers (to know basic CRS info). This is free (we charge $20 in Mississauga http://www.sja.ca/Ontario/Training/P...tWorkshop.aspx

- training of CRS-Techs who are selected volunteers. Is this also free? We charge $150 for 2 days course work and 1 day of hands-on clinic http://www.sja.ca/Ontario/Training/P...tTraining.aspx

Impressive if all is free in AB

**shauburg** · 03-01-2010, 04:13 PM

It looks like their next newsletter is not until April, so I've e-mailed them to ask for more info on this program.

**snowbird25ca** · 03-02-2010, 12:40 PM

I am aware of the program being rolled out. One of the people from the Edmonton branch who is involved in the roll out was part of the class I taught last May here. Edmonton is the first to do a trial run I believe.

From what I understand it is going to be a very basic providing of information - but I haven't seen the final product - was only aware of the planning being done and the goal of it. (Goal being educate parents on the basics of installing a seat right.)

The volunteers they are speaking of training for free are the ones who will be teaching the parent education sessions. In other words, all of the free information sessions will be taught by somebody who is a CRST. They will not be instructors, but will be performing the role as somebody has has received specialized education in the subject and so is hopefully better able to communicate the information.

If it is brand new volunteers with no widespread practical experience, it will be interesting to see how it works out... It takes time for a new tech to "get their feet under them" and get a flow of how to talk to parents and answer questions. The hard part of these classes won't be the teaching the basics that have already been put together - the hard part will be answering questions that parents have. And somebody with very limited experience is likely to have problems with that.

(CRST's are qualified to teach basic info sessions to parents, they are Not qualified to certify somebody else as a CRST though. So these parents will just be getting very basic info.)

My issue with all these parent empowerment models is they do absolutely nothing to address compatibility issues. Ones that a tech can likely deal with - but that the average parent isn't going to know to do. Manuals are getting better at putting some of those tricks in there - but still, manuals can be confusing and are rarely read as it is...

**hipmaman** · 03-02-2010, 02:24 PM

My question would then be 'what about the hands-on' portion which is what you are saying, Trudy. Practical experience means quite a bit after the 2 days in the classroom and the ability to address compatibility or incompatibility come from the practical experience. You know how it is with a person perusing forums, text books on an issue but it never hits home as it would when he/she actually see it irl. And the ability to try to overcome these challenges can only be done when actually presented with the problem in person, not from a textbook. Kwim?

**snowbird25ca** · 03-02-2010, 05:08 PM

Originally Posted by hipmaman

My question would then be 'what about the hands-on' portion which is what you are saying, Trudy. Practical experience means quite a bit after the 2 days in the classroom and the ability to address compatibility or incompatibility come from the practical experience. You know how it is with a person perusing forums, text books on an issue but it never hits home as it would when he/she actually see it irl. And the ability to try to overcome these challenges can only be done when actually presented with the problem in person, not from a textbook. Kwim?

Yeah, the person teaching will have to be certified - so should have that one clinic under their belt... but definitely won't have the experience to field questions from parents with confidence.

From what I can tell there will be no checking or fixing of the parents seats involved, so it's all going to be verbal... which for someone who has no point of reference in the way of experience, is going to be very difficult.

OTOH, maybe some info is better than none? But what if these parents go home, try to fix their seats, and realize they can't. There is no resource to help them deal with it. So then they're stuck driving around knowing their seat isn't in right and that they can't fix it? I don't know... yeah, volunteers save the health care system money. But it's not going to fix everything - or even most things...

**shauburg** · 03-11-2010, 06:08 PM

I agree with you Trudy & Tam. If there is no "hands-on" portion to these sessions or no place for them to get their seats checked, a large percentage of parents who attend these sessions will still have errors in their installations/use. I was not sent any details on if they plan to do anything like this.

I did find out that they are having an orientation session for volunteers for this new program on March 24. I do not have the time right now to either attend this session or volunteer (maybe later in the year - DD still feeds too frequently and is having some issues). If anyone wants to go, PM me and I'll e-mail you the contact details.

**shauburg** · 04-30-2010, 03:41 PM

I just wanted to update that SJA now has information on these sessions up on their web-site - http://www.sja.ca/Alberta/Pages/Chil...nSessions.aspx

Did anyone go to the April session or know someone who did?