How Blueberry Nursery work to prevent Burns and Scalds happening…

Blueberry Nursery offers an exceptional environment that gives children from 1 to 5 the best early year’s experience. The care and education is delivered by a fully qualified team of early years’ specialists, teachers and practitioners. In this blog Nursery Manager Amelia Walsh talks about what the nursery has put in place to prevent burns and scalds happening to children in their care…

At Blueberry Nursery we take the safety of all children extremely seriously. With around 64 children attending the nursery every day, a large staff team and many parents coming in and out of the building it is important that we make everyone aware of how they can keep themselves and others safe. In particular, we feel it is vital to educate everyone involved with the nursery about the potential causes of burns and scalds.

At Blueberry, we place great importance on hiring the right staff. We go through lengthy recruitment and interview processes to ensure that we are hiring practitioners who make the safety and wellbeing of the children their first priority. We choose to send all our staff on a paediatric first aid course every 3 years so that they have regularly updated comprehensive training for all situations – from a common scrape to a more serious medical emergency. As an extension of this training we educate our staff about the risks of hot drinks causing burns or scalds and implement a rule that hot drinks can only be consumed in the kitchen or the staff area, where there are no children. It is understood by everyone why hot drinks cannot be carried through the nursery and our staff and parents are keen to follow this rule to keep all children safe.

All areas of our nursery have their own risk assessment, which outlines all potential dangers and how we can avoid these causing harm to the children. These are updated every 6 months and our health and safety officer Lyndsay liaises closely with the practitioners to identify any new risks. One of the very important things we do is to cap the temperature that the hot water in the building can reach so that children are safe to wash their hands without potentially scalding themselves. Many of our classes in the nursery have carried out their own risk assessment of their area with the children, encouraging them to identify the potential risks and discussing how they can keep themselves safe. This helps to reinforce for the children what they can to on a day-to-day basis to avoid getting hurt.

Blueberry nursery has a kitchen on site where we prepare fresh, healthy and organic meals for the whole nursery. The children regularly join staff members as they go to fetch their snack items from the kitchen. All staff make it clear to the children that they must stay outside the kitchen doorway while their teacher goes inside, it is explained to everyone that this is because equipment like the oven may be hot and could cause a scald or burn. We also have a cook who is based in the kitchen while any equipment is being used like our electric hob. She ensures that our ovens are turned off at the wall before the kitchen is left unattended, which further safeguards children and staff against the risk of burning themselves.

We have a Facebook page which we update regularly with fun photos of activities we have been doing in the nursery. Lots of our parents follow us online and this is another great way to communicate to parents and carers how they can keep their children safe and avoid the risks associated with burns and scalds.

For more resources and help with educating children, parents, carers and teachers on the risks of burns and scalds, and the appropriate first aid if a burn or scald were to occur please visit our Learning Zone and First Aid area.