A four-year-old charter guest is lifted off the swim platform, coughing, grey and frightened. Her parents are screaming at you. You are the only crew member on that deck, and every face turns to you. What you can actually do in that moment was decided weeks earlier, by the training you either completed or did not.
Read This Before Anything Else
These xplor lessons are preparatory study only. They are not a Paediatric First Aid certificate, and they do not qualify you to give first aid to a child. Nothing here replaces being taught, practised and assessed in person by an approved training provider.
This course deliberately does not teach resuscitation, chest compressions, rescue breaths, back blows or abdominal thrusts. Those are hands-on, physically assessed skills. A child is not a small adult: the forces, the hand positions and the sequences differ, and getting them wrong causes harm. They cannot be learned safely from a screen, and this course will not pretend otherwise.
What This Course Actually Does
| This course gives you | This course cannot give you |
|---|---|
| Awareness of what goes wrong with children at sea | Any life-saving technique |
| Understanding of the yacht response chain | Permission to perform one |
| Knowledge of prevention and preparation | Certification or assessment |
| The vocabulary to brief a doctor by satellite | Clinical judgement |
By the end you should be able to recognise a paediatric emergency, raise the alarm correctly, understand who onboard does what, and help prepare the vessel and yourself. You should also be able to say clearly why you must book a proper course.
The Qualification You Actually Need
- A current, practically assessed Paediatric First Aid certificate from an approved provider (for example a regulated Level 3 award), renewed before it expires.
- For crew generally, STCW Elementary First Aid; at senior level, Medical First Aid and Medical Care Aboard Ship.
- Whatever your flag state and the yacht safety management system require for your role.
Do the reading here. Then book the course, turn up, and be assessed by a human being who watches you do it.
The Honest Framing
Throughout these lessons one instruction repeats: raise the alarm, get help, and do only what you are trained to do. That is not a get-out clause. On a yacht, the fastest route to a good outcome is almost never one untrained person improvising. It is the alarm reaching the bridge, the designated medical person arriving with the medical locker, a doctor on the satellite phone, and the captain making the evacuation decision.
Onboard Notes
- Write your certificate expiry date somewhere you will actually see it.
- Ask the captain or chief stew who the designated medical person is, today, on this vessel.
- If you cannot name that person, you are not ready for the next lesson.