Care beyond plasters: First Aid Education in Indonesia

According to the International Federation of the Red Cross, millions of minor injuries occur every year and early treatment is the best way to protect against possible infections. That’s why our Health Care brands announced last year its goal of educating 200,000 children worldwide in first aid and wound care by the end of 2025. Hansaplast, Elastoplast and CURITAS launched this global social mission last year during the celebration of Hansaplast’s 100th anniversary. The child-friendly education programs have already been set up in nine countries: Germany, Indonesia, India, the United Kingdom, Australia, Belgium, France, Austria and Greece. The social mission is anchored in the society pillar of the Health Care sustainability strategy – next to consumers and the environment. To understand how exactly the local implementation of a global social mission can look like, Yosephine Carolline took time for an interview. She is responsible for the Hansaplast social mission in Indonesia and explains what the team has already achieved and what is planned for the future.

Of course! Our local project is called ANAK SIAGA HANSAPLAST. Based on our global social mission it focuses on early education on first aid treatment for wound care. By initiating child-friendly educational programs we teach kids first aid skills to reduce the risk of infection caused by everyday injuries.

Since last year, we have Sehat-Q as a strong partner at our side for this purpose. This is a growing health publisher in Indonesia. In 2022 they helped us to visit 15 primary schools with a total of 1,204 students in Jakarta. During the visits, doctors trained students in first aid and distributed first aid kits to them and the schools.

We also work with Tentang Anak, one of the largest parent communities. With them, we educate parents online about first aid directly at home. We are proud of the project and therefore look forward to continuing to raise awareness for the importance of first aid and infection prevention – whether through press work or painting competitions for children.

We didn’t start from scratch. Many Hansaplast, Elastoplast and CURITAS teams around the world have been involved in first aid before – including us in Indonesia. Since 2015, we have been communicating the relevance of early training in this area and supporting the appropriate training of children in schools and scouts. This is simply a matter of the heart for us. It’s all the more great that since last year we now have a global framework for it and can thus achieve even more together worldwide! This also reflects our brand purpose in a special way: “We’ve got you covered. For a life uninterrupted”. For us, this means that we are not only there for people with our best-in-class product solutions, but also beyond that. For example, with our social commitment.

In fact, it is not 8 years because we had to stop the activities for one year due to COVID-19. But for this background, we are even more proud of what we have achieved as a team in Indonesia. Between 2015 to 2022, we have reached a total of 101,028 children, 81,470 parents and 2,185 teachers. And even though we want to educate children, the role of parents and teachers should not be underestimated. After all, they often serve as multipliers and can pass on their knowledge to many more children. That’s why we also implement train-the-trainer courses. Another special measure was the children’s books that we published together with the local Red Cross organization. The children, whom we could not train directly ourselves, have a great opportunity to learn about first aid and wound care in a playful way through these story books

We want to expand our successful work even further and train even more children. This year, we have therefore already set ourselves particularly ambitious goals. We are targeting a total of 50 schools to implement first aid education and training on site and virtually. We are also focusing on broad-based social media activations. So, we want to continue to expand our reach through a multifaceted approach to educate as many people as possible with our first aid knowledge. Currently, we plan to reach more than 5,000 children from school activation and 3,000 parents with our courses and many more people via educational communication.

An impressive goal! Good luck to the whole team with the implementation and thank you for the interview!

Carolin is responsible for our Pharmacy and Selective Brands within the Corporate Communications team. In this way she takes care of international communication projects of brands like Eucerin, Aquaphor, Hansaplast and La Prairie.