An assist carries with it a certain responsibility. A person goes through life and meets many people. You will quite likely find yourself in situations where a stranger would benefit from an assist.

Your approach under these circumstances should be straightforward and positive. Be professional and definite. You don’t even need to ask for permission, just do it. If you are going to help some stranger out, help him out. If something happens, like an accident, don’t stand around explaining to people what you are going to do or waiting for permission. If you are at the scene where there is noise and confusion, act as though you are the one in charge and you will be the one in charge. If you do this well, the assists you give will help people.

For example, there is a serious accident and a crowd of people are pushing each other trying to see what happened. The police are trying to push the people back. Well, push the people back and then lean over the victim and give him an assist. If you are enough there, everybody else will realize that you are the one that is there.

Things like panic, worry, wonder, upset, looking dreamily into the far distance, wondering what is wrong or what should be done have nothing to do with giving an assist. You should remain very calm. Realize that to take control of any situation it is only necessary to be there more than anybody else. There is no magic involved. Just be there. The other people at the scene aren’t. And if you are there enough, then the person you are trying to help will pull himself out of it and go on living.

Where you are giving an assist to a person, put things in the environment into an orderly state as the first step, unless you need to give immediate first aid.

First aid always precedes an assist. You should look the situation over to determine how much first aid is required. Maybe you will find somebody with a temperature of 106 degrees who needs to lie down and be cooled off before any assist is done. He might be better off to be taken to a doctor to get a shot of antibiotics than with an assist at the time.

A good example would be a situation where a woman is washing dishes in the kitchen. Suddenly, there is a loud crash and the woman falls down and hits the floor. But as she is going down, she grabs a butcher knife and cuts her hand. One of the first things you would do is wrap a bandage around her hand to stop the bleeding. Another part of the first aid would be to pick up the dishes and put them back on the sink and sweep the pieces together into a pile. This is the first step toward restoring control.

Then you would give her an assist. To remove her from the scene of the accident is not as desirable as doing the assist on her there. Perhaps this is contrary to what you believe, but it is true, and is why you bring some order into the environment first. You put in order in a much wider sphere than a cut hand so that you bring about a healing of the cut hand. If you understand that your responsibility always extends much wider than the immediate zone of noise and confusion, you will be more successful. If you bring order to the wider environment, you also bring it to the narrower environment.

If you know you are going into a zone of accidents and you are going to be around a great deal of destruction and chaos, you would be very foolish not to have first-aid training. Keep in mind that you may often have to find some method of controlling, handling and directing personnel who get in your way before you can give an assist. In this case an assist requires that you control the entire environment and personnel associated with the assist if necessary.

You have every right and responsibility to relieve suffering when you see it.

The primary method of relieving suffering is the assist.