Thanks to Mike and Tracy who report on a really worthwhile emergency first aid course they have just been on.  Something that everyone doing potentially dangerous things in the woods really ought to consider.

I’m reliably informed that no limbs or body parts where actually removed from any of the participants!

Last weekend Tracy and I both went on a brilliant ‘wilderness first aid’ course run by Emergency Life Support Team, which was run in a woodland near Hastings. Our main instructor was Andy Sullivan, who has years of experience in the emergency services and is eminently qualified to teach people to save lives.
He was also assisted by Ali, whose speciality was setting up realistic incidents for us to train on – here she is with some self-inflicted ‘injuries’:

Peter joined us too on the second day, to act as a patient and also give us advice from the perspective of someone with police experience. Here he is, suffering from a shooting-related eye ‘injury’:

Andy actually prefers to call it a ‘First Responder’ course, rather than first aid. This is because he’s encountered a public perception that ‘first aid’ is about plasters and bandages, when in fact what he’s covering in the course is more about the serious life-threatening conditions we might encounter. We did of course cover minor injuries, but the main focus was on learning what to do with the more serious situations and gaining confidence through practice.

Anyway, the important point is that only about 1 in 50 people in the UK actually have the training to be a first responder, and if more of us were then lives would be saved. The two most important aspects of this course for me were the professional instruction and the experience gained through acted-out scenarios, and I’d thoroughly recommend anyone to go on a course like this. Just to give it another plug, here’s the website: www.elst.co.uk

Of course, the bonus was that we also got to spend two days outdoors in the woods as well! 🙂

Thanks Mike and Tracy, you can see the unabridged  multicoloured gory details on the Peplers blog here!