New OHbaby! experts talk about motherhood and family first aid

Paediatric intensive care nurses (and brand new OHbaby! experts) Charlotte Young and Teresa Wong are empowering parents with their one of a kind first aid courses. 

Words: Kahu de Beer
Photography: Alice Veysey

Charlotte Young and Teresa Wong are the incredible duo behind & Breathe, a recently launched first aid education service for parents and caregivers. Both Charlotte and Teresa are paediatric intensive care unit nurses, with backgrounds in university level teaching. With their passion and combined skill-sets the two have created a modern, immersive, and personal experience that’s being welcomed with open arms by paediatric health professionals and parents alike.

The idea for & Breathe came about while Charlotte was at a playgroup with her daughter Sophie, who was around 6 months at the time. “Everyone was about to start their babies on solids and all the parents were talking about how scared they were of their children choking” says Charlotte. “I started sharing what I knew from my nursing knowledge and realised how desperate parents were for this information.” When her friends started coming back and telling her how helpful her advice had been Charlotte began looking around for first aid courses that she could point people towards but couldn’t find anything that truly met the baby and child first aid needs she felt families required.

The wheels started turning with the idea of creating a course herself and Charlotte reached out to her close friend and colleague of seven years, Teresa Wong, to see if it would be something she’d like to be a part of too. Charlotte says Teresa was the first person that came to mind as she knew she had always wanted to do something outside of PICU to support families, and she’s also a skilled educator; with one of her roles alongside full-time nursing being a university tutor for training nurses doing child health placements. “We complement each other well, Teresa has an in-depth understanding of how people learn and is skilled at presenting information in a way that works for different learning styles. My strength is in research. I create the content and Teresa helps to make it accessible to all types of learners” says Charlotte.

Charlotte comes from a very medical family, many of whom are specialised child-health based practitioners like herself, so joining the medical profession was in her blood. Going straight into nursing from high school, Charlotte says that she was motivated by the idea of being in a profession where she could support and positively impact people. “I loved the thought of being able to make a huge difference in someone's life. We all have a memory of someone like that and it’s so impacting” she says.

With both her and her husband coming from large families, Charlotte always imagined having kids of her own but says that it’s not the defining factor of her identity. “Although I love being a mum, I wasn’t one of those people that felt like they were born to be a mother. For me I don’t feel changed as a person by being a mum, I am who I am but I’m also a parent and it’s a really important part of my life” she says. Once they decided to start a family, Charlotte says she was worried about how long it would take to get pregnant. “I was quite apprehensive because often nurses in high stress/shift work roles such as mine struggle to get pregnant – I’d seen lots of my friends in the PICU go through infertility. I was very fortunate that it took only a few months.”

Physically, Charlotte says she had a dream pregnancy, but mentally she suffered, “I was so anxious the whole way through, it was the peak of Covid in the hospital and I was the only one of five pregnant PICU nurses still on the floor working. I ended up leaving work at 32 weeks as I couldn’t manage with the stress of it all” she says. Charlotte got referred to maternal mental health but continued to battle with anxiety right up until the birth, but once her daughter was born Charlotte says that the anxiety left her instantly. Compared to the mental struggles she faced during pregnancy Charlotte says that the newborn stage was a lot more manageable. “Despite having issues with breastfeeding which meant I was triple feeding for the first nine weeks, and being tired, I didn’t feel stressed” she says. “I remember in pregnancy being so worried about postnatal depression that I’d had conversations with my wider family to discuss how they would support me during this time if it happened but thankfully I was fine” says Charlotte.

When her daughter Sophie was 7 months old, Charlotte went back to work part-time at the hospital. “The reason I went back was to help my mental health, to help build up my identity again, outside of being a mother” she says, “when you become a parent a lot of the time you have this massive identity shift, you go from being an independent, career person to someone who can’t even have a shower by themselves. It can be quite challenging for your mental health” she says. Charlotte was fortunate to have family to help with childcare which made the transition a lot easier.

Charlotte has worked in paediatric intensive care – where she is now a senior level clinical nurse – since 2015. “Emergencies are not uncommon in the paediatric ICU, sometimes there is one every shift, often for those families involved it will be the worst day of their lives. If I can be someone who supports them in their hardest moment, I feel like I’m doing what I was made to do”. Charlotte says that being paediatric intensive care nurses brings in a huge amount of reality to the courses her and Teresa run. “In our jobs we’re talking to parents that have had to do CPR on their child, we see how important knowing those key safety, first aid skills are. We have children come in that have survived because their parents have had these skills. And sadly, on the other side of that, we see kids who didn’t get what they needed'' she says.

There has been an overwhelmingly positive response to the & Breathe courses, with a growing number of paediatricians, obstetricians, and midwives now recommending them as the gold standard for baby and child first aid. “We’ve had a lot of support from medical practitioners. They love the content and believe in what we’re doing” says Charlotte. “They often say that this is exactly what parents need, it’s the missing piece of the puzzle”. Charlotte believes the parenting space is now so heavily influenced by social media which is leaving parents feeling anxious and confused. “Every day I see dangerous advice on social media, and a lot of people are listening to this. In the ten years I’ve been working in the health system I’ve seen it become more and more stretched which is why getting these skills to parents is so vital, they might not get them anywhere else” says Charlotte.

The & Breathe courses are unique and specialised in that the content has been developed over hundreds of hours of consulting with subject specialists, researching, and cross referencing current guidelines to ensure all information is accurate and constantly up to date. Both Charlotte and Teresa confess to having perfectionist tendencies from their years of experience as paediatric ICU nurses, “You can’t afford to miss anything when so much is at stake” says Charlotte. The size limit of their classes is another factor that sets them apart. While many first aid courses will often have up to 20 people per class, & Breathe classes are capped at 8 people when learning CPR and choking first aid; this is based on evidence that people learn best in groups of this size, and it’s also the current standard in Europe for similar courses. “We want to give every family an opportunity to learn effective and correct first aid in a way that works for them and to help break down any learning barriers that might be getting in the way” says Charlotte.

For Charlotte and Teresa their courses are about empowering families with knowledge and skills so that they’re confident if an emergency situation ever arises. Charlotte says that the current statistics show that 82% of adults in New Zealand aren’t confident in their CPR skills. And adds that when it comes to CPR for children, the skills needed are even more complex. “We give information to parents that actually help to prevent a lot of emergency situations from happening. Particularly injuries, there are so many simple ways to prevent a lot of the injuries children end up in hospital with. If we can help one family it’s all worth it – that’s what drives us” says Charlotte.

Visit andbreathefirstaid.co.nz and @andbreathefirstaid on Instagram.