Some medical emergencies happen most often in the home, and they need to be addressed quickly, before help arrives.
So what do you do when an infant or young child is choking?
“The, most common thing they see in the emergency room is grapes, followed by hot dogs and tortilla chips,” said Angie Skeen, community education coordinator for Intermountain McKay Dee Hospital.
Kids will put just about anything in their mouths, and that can lead to big problems. Oftentimes it’s food items like Skeen mentioned above, but kids can also choke on things like magnets, button batteries, pen or marker caps, toys, coins, and more.
What are the first signs that a child is choking and may be in trouble? How do you check?
“We do that by noticing that they're coughing, and no noise is coming out. Their face might be going blue or their lips. At that point, we need to intervene. If they are choking and coughing noises coming out, they're still able to speak, we're gonna let them go ahead and try to get the object out themselves at that point. So, let's say our infant is choking, we're gonna grab him put him on our forearm.”
Skeen continued, “You can use your knee to rest the infant on. And you're going to let gravity help you by putting them downwards like this. And you'll perform five back slaps between the two shoulder blades with the palm of your hands.”
These are not soft pats. You need to use some force to help get the object out of the child’s airway as soon as possible.
Skeen said after performing back slaps, if there is no response you need to quickly adjust.
“If no response and we're going to make like we like to say a baby sandwich to support the infant's head, flip them over upwards. Same thing, let gravity help you. And then we're going to perform five chest thrusts. If we can't see the object at all, nothing's coming out, we'll go ahead and move on to the five chest thrusts and it's in the center of the chest just below the nipple line and in and up, kind of like I like to say imagine pushing air in and up to try to get that object out. So, after five times, if the object still hasn't come out. We're gonna go back to back slaps. And we're gonna repeat this.”
Ideally the child will cough up the object and start breathing.
You can find detailed step-by-step child and infant CPR instructions from the American Heart Association.
If you would like some hands-on instruction on how to perform infant CPR, Intermountain Health offers classes for $15. The classes are available in person or online and take about 90 minutes. Visit intermountainhealth.org to find out more and sign up.
