Advanced Pet First Aid Level 3 (VTQ)
Course Content
- Introduction to Advanced Pet First Aid
- Course Introduction
- Course Overview
- Before we start - Coronavirus COVID 19 advice for pet owners from the government
- Meet Your Vet
- Pet First Aid and The Law
- The vet and your role in first aid
- The Role of the Pet First Aider
- When is Veterinary Care Required?
- Keeping your pet safe in an emergency
- Car Accidents
- Pet Proofing your home
- Please rescue my pets stickers
- Hand Hygiene
- Dog Microchipping
- Precautions and Safety
- Anatomy and Physiology
- First Aid Kits and Equipment
- Checking a Dog's health
- Pet Accidents and First Aid
- CPR
- Choking
- Bleeding Control
- Different Conditions you may see
- Injuries
- Suspected fractures
- Pet Fractures Treatment
- Types of fractures on animals
- Spinal injury and moving an injured pet
- Paw Problems
- Nail and Claw Injuries
- Eye Injuries
- Eye Problems
- Bandaging the Ear
- Bandaging the Tail and Tail Injuries
- Puncture Wounds
- Animal bites and scratches on pets
- Stings on animals
- Ibuprofen and pets
- Carbon Monoxide and pets
- Vet poison information line
- Inducing Vomiting in a Dog
- Snake Bites
- Pet Burns
- Electrocution
- Cruciate Ligament
- Illness
- Pets and Illnesses
- Bloat and Gastric Dilatation and Volvulus (GDV)
- High Temperatures and Heatstroke
- Hypothermia Treatment
- Vomiting in Animals
- Different Types and Causes of Vomiting
- Seizures and Epilepsy
- Allergies in Pets
- Pancreatitis
- Cushings Disease
- Coughing and kennel cough
- Diarrhoea in Animals
- Rabies
- Alabama Foot Rot
- Blue Green Algae
- Pyometra
- Vestibular Syndrome
- Parasites that affect pets
- Cats
- Different types and sizes of animals
- Summary of Advanced Pet First Aid
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Get StartedBreathing and Respiratory Problems
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What we are going to look at now is breathing and respiration. Now, Deco laying here, you can see her breathing, she is just calmly breathing in and out. She is breathing through her nose, she is not panting, she is quite sleepy. So, she is breathing calmly. Now, the sort of indicators we need to look at where there is a breathing problem potentially will be some other signs. It may well be that as she is breathing she is really massively flaring her nostrils out, or maybe she is breathing, and you can see a lot more movement from her neck. Now with here you can see the chest rise and fall, but maybe an indication of a problem could be whether a lot of the breathing is occurring in the stomach. So, you can see the stomach rising and falling. Also, the breathing is calm, it is making little puffing noises, but there is no noise. So, another thing you could check is to put your ear down and listen to her breathing. Is it normal? Is it raspy? Are there any problems? Other things you can do with breathing problems can be, maybe she is standing up, she is arched, or she is coughing a lot. It's not really normal for a dog to cough. They would not normally get infections that would cause coughs. So that could indicate that there is some kind of breathing problem. Now as you are monitoring their breathing, obviously if the breathing stops, then we have ourselves a very serious condition. So, if the breathing has stopped we can do rescue breaths. Now we are going to cover this in a separate video, we will be looking at full CPR process. But just to explain a minute, if we are doing rescue breaths on a dog with a large nose like this, we need to just seal around the mouth with one hand, and then we blow into her nose. So that is the way of putting the air in. As far as opening the airway up, if we keep the airway literally just opened up a little bit, we can pull the tongue out to one side and then seal it around. Now tongues are quite hard to get a hold of, so what you can do with that is take a small piece of gauze, or a bit of material, or hanky, fold it over the tongue to hold the tongue and move it. And then you can put the breaths in, by just blowing them straight up the nose. We seal the mouth, so we do not want the air to go in the nose and straight out the mouth again. If we did do rescue breaths on a dog, we are doing them at a rate of around about once every six seconds. That works very well, we have about 10 a minute, and that is the sort of normal rate. Now it is important to see the chest rise, and then it will fall back down again. If you put them in too quickly, you will find that putting the air in too fast, it doesn't get a chance for the air to come out again, and that is just as important to put it in. So roughly one every six seconds. But going back to sort of general respiratory problems, if there is anything you are worried about, anything that is not normal, it is definitely worth contacting a vet. That said, it may well be with Deco she could be out running. Ella particularly, she has a habit of when she gets excited and running around she makes grunting noises. It sounds like she has a breathing problem, but we have had her checked out by the vets. There is absolutely nothing wrong. So, with Ella, what is normal for her, is a little bit different to what is normal for Deco.
- Check for breathing by looking, listening and feeling for up to ten seconds
- If there are no signs of breathing you can start chest compressions to force air out of the lungs and draw fresh air in
- You can provide mouth to nose ventilation, by pulling the tongue out gently, closing the mouth and blowing into the nose
If an animal is having breathing problems due to poison, you need to be very careful not to get the poison on you.
Choking can be a serious problem, but often it looks worse than it is if your pet chokes remember:
- Animals are very good at clearing an obstruction themselves, so give them time and space to try to clear the obstruction.
- Do not push your fingers down the throat of an animal, as you may push the item down or get bitten.
- If the animal becomes unresponsive, chest compressions can help to clear an obstruction.
- Prevention is best, so make sure food is safe to eat and stored out of reach.