Communicating Safety

I had meant to post this back when it happened.  Back in September when I was at the First Aid/CPR renewal class, the instructor leading us in practical demonstration actually ran into a problem.  Four members of our class are not from the United States and while fluent in English, there are some cultural references not known.  Some turns of phrase and what most people would consider common knowledge may not carry over.

In this specific example, the instructor was trying to describe a knot used when tying off a bandage and it lost all of the English as a second language students and a couple of the English as primary.  As it turned out, the kind of knot was known, just each had a different name for it.  A demonstration would have been more effective in this case.

So the lesson here is that when talking about safety, it's important to establish a common frame of reference and confirming all know what is being discussed.  It's important to know your audience.  Otherwise you can run into this cultural reference that I'm not sure everyone reading this will know.