Wilderness First Aid Certified!

Wow - that was quite a weekend. 2 days, 9 hours each day to complete an approximately 16 hour course. The Red Cross is working on a nationally recognized Wilderness First Aid certification and this was one of their "prototype" classes- to test out the material, scenarios and tests.

All in all, it was more heavily geared towards first aid primarily and the wilderness secondarily. Which honestly seemed a little backwards. To me, you almost have a regular/urban first aid course as a pre-requisite, talk about the differences in the wilderness/remote setting and how do you prolong life (in critical emergencies) when help is 1 hour or 1 day or more away. As well, it would have been nice to been pointed in the direction of what you can use as alternatives if you don't have a full first aid kit (i.e. we used straps to secure splints).

The one thing that was helpful throughout the slides and the book, was the break-downs of what are critical emergencies (where help is needed as quickly as possible - helicopter, SAR teams, etc.), major emergencies (where the trip needs to be aborted and you need to get yourselves to help immediately) and minor incidents (where it can be treated in the field and the trip goes on). A lot of it was common sense, but it's always good to have other people re-tell you that you're on the right track.

Each day, we did scenarios - where we would act out 1 or 2 of us being victims and the rest of the teams being the first aid responders. Being a victim is odd- I was...

1. a person who fell off of a fence (I pretended to vomit upon my first aider),
2. a person wrecked mountain bikes with another person (I had acorns thrown at me by the irate person who I wrecked into),
3. a person who got bit by a snake and then fell onto a root which caused my chest to have a hole in it (I got carried on a make-shift stretcher).

Fun times. An interesting note, "The Neat Sheet" really IS "Ready for Anything". My first aiders on the last scenario were able to use one as a stretcher to carry me a short distance.