Yu Ming charter school started in Oakland, California as a way to teach Chinese to children in an immersion program. They wanted to give Bay Area children a chance to become bilingual in Mandarin and English. They wanted all of the children to be safe and healthy.

The villain in the story was the unhealthy monster.

The problem on the inside was a fear of something happening to the children and not knowing how to handle it.

It showed up as kids getting hurt and not being able to get the help they needed. The staff were not trained in first aid and emergency procedures and they didn’t have the necessary tools and equipment to provide adequate care for the children.

The conflict was having groups of young children with an entire range of health issues, but without the budget, training or resources to remedy this. There was also the conflict of American values of healthcare, British values of healthcare and Chinese values of healthcare.

When we got involved in the situation, we set up a training program for the staff and the students to teach basic first aid.

With my 40 years of experience in health and healing, I was able to put together a training program that allowed my children to actually do the teaching. They had been practicing emergency procedures and first aid ever since they were young.

We showed them how to assess a situation, triage for priority, set up the necessary resources to take care of the issues and how to do regular trainings to rapidly improve the skills and abilities of everyone.

We first had everyone pair up with a partner so that they could practice what we were training them for. We then had everybody call out the main issues that they wanted to learn about and that they believed would be the most common experiences. We then took them through a number of different common scenarios in order of seriousness.

We were able to set up a core medical staff, put together an outline of emergency procedures, answer questions as it happened in real time and show that children can take care of other children if necessary.

The entire staff and student body were able to take care of all the basic health issues for the next several years and eventually developed an entire health system based on the needs and budget at the time. Several critical situations were handled effectively and with no major detriment.

They were able to transform from being inexperienced and unclear to having high levels of health and wellness for everyone.