How to put together a first aid kit for the outdoors
How to put together a first aid kit outdoors
Wilderness personal medical kits
How do you put a first aid kit together for the outdoors? Or a bushcraft first aid kit? Are first aid kits for mountain biking different to ones for kayaking?
Carrying a first aid kit in your rucksack or in your personal kit is pretty difficult to argue against. The problem is – how much do you carry, and what exactly do you carry? Once you start going down the road of visualising every possible emergency medical scenario and wanting to ‘be prepared’ for it. Before long you end up carrying several kilograms of equipment that in all likelihood you will never use – but you somehow feel that you need to.
The reality is actually a lot simpler. There are two important points to remember for outdoor emergency first aid:
- Training is the absolute most important thing you can put your time and money into. Knowledge weighs nothing and the most important lifesaving techniques require good personal skills but little to no equipment.
- If you are on your own in the middle of nowhere then the options open to you self-treatment are actually very limited.
With that mildly-sobering thought in mind – how do you put together a first aid kit for the outdoors?
The answer is dependent on several factors:
- The environment you are travelling too/through and specific hazards it may contain
- The length of trip
- Distance/time to evacuation and medical care in case of emergency
- The number of people (and animals) in the party
- The existing medical conditions of those in the party
- The training and skill level of those in the party
- The activities you are performing
- Your carrying capacity (rucksack, canoe, vehicle, porters etc)
For example – the medical kit for a 5-week sailing voyage to the Lofoten islands would be different to that of a solo lightweight backpacker on a 3-day summer trip in the Cairngorms. For the former a Bag Valve Mask (BVM) and full suture kit would be appropriate but would a little ridiculous for the solo hiker.
I have used various medical kits in my work over the years. In my time in a Mountain Rescue team I carried a small personal first aid kit that contained a minimal number of items and drugs – but it was designed to be pooled with the other kits carried by fellow rescuers to form a larger and more comprehensive kit. I supplemented this with items purchased myself such as Tuffcut shears and nitrile gloves. When working as a remote-area medic as support on long-distance races and outdoor challenges I was either carrying a very comprehensive kit issued by the company employing me, or I was given a budget to supply my own equipment at my own specification. I have also put together my own for various trips, plus also kits for Original Outdoors staff and freelance contractors to use when working with our own clients. Each case has been slightly different…
The easy answer to “what’s the best outdoor first aid kit?” is – they all are. The real skill is choosing or building one that suits where you are going, what you are doing and what you’re doing when you get there. To that end I’ve put together a video on the decision-making process that I go through for any trip or scenario, and the items I carry in one of my personal kits:
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First Aid Kit Contents
The list below is based on the items shown in the video, with links to buy them directly from Amazon. Some of the brands or sizes are slightly different or only a few representations of what I carry. The items are not listed in order of importance, just to roughly match the order from the video.
I’ve also put a link to the Lifesystems first aid kit which is a very similar off-the-shelf kit that I can personally recommend – even if it’s used as a base to add other items to.
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Nitrile Gloves
Get them in any colour other than red or black – you need to be able to see if blood suddenly appears on them when giving a primary or secondary survey as it will steer you towards a major bleed you may have missed.
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Resus Face Shield
An item of personal safety that should be somewhere easy to reach but can also make your CPR technique more effective.
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Anti Bacterial Wipes
Great for cleaning up after dealing with a minor wound and preventing your kit contaminating everything it touches.
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Alcohol Hand Gel
Be aware that carrying alcohol in your first aid kit may cause issues when travelling to countries where alcohol is banned or severely restricted
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Normasol Sachets
Sterile topical solution in sachets for careful application over wider areas.
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Sterile Eye Wash Pods
Sterile topical solution in pods for washing foreign bodies from eyes.
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Fabric Adhesive Dressing Strip
Adhesive dressing strip on a roll for making custom plasters/band-aids for tricky areas like between fingers.
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SteriStrips
Temporary adhesive suture strips for wound closure.
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Blister Plasters
Being able to treat or manage a blister can make the difference between carrying on or turning around to go home
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Non-Adherent Dressings
General use dressings without any adhesive.
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Triangular Bandage
I have yet to use one of these as a sling, but they are quite useful for holding other dressings on or wrapping over wide areas.
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Wound dressings (Various sizes)
Absorbent wound dressings in various sizes
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Travel Mirror
Great for reaching places that the eyeball can’t!
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Glucose Gel
Glucose gel for hypoglycemic emergencies.
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Round-Tip Scissors
Small scissors with rounded ends for safety
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TuffCut Shears
Tough shears for emergency clothing removal
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Tweezers
For removal of small foreign bodies
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Microlance Needles
Tiny sterile needles for making small holes to drain blisters etc
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Disposable Thermometer
Of limited use in a first aid environment but helpful for long-term monitoring of a patient
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Tick Removal Card
For safe removal of ticks
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CAT Tourniquet
Not for general carry and must be trained in use
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SAM Splint
Useful but heavy and other items can be improvised to replace it.
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Lifesystems Mountain Leader First Aid Kit
A comprehensive and well-designed outdoor first aid kit.
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- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Emergency and Safety, First Aid, Mountain General, Personal, Skills, Tools and Equipment, Videos
The role of Mountain Rescue
The role of Mountain Rescue?
What job should UK mountain rescue teams be doing?
Below is a quote from the wife of a UK Mountain Rescue team member, posted on the Facebook page of a regional newspaper on a story about Police pay:
[pullquote style=”left” quote=”dark”]They farm more and more of the “unpleasant” work out to organisations such as mountain rescue teams who have to pick up the dead bodies from farm and road accidents. If they are not happy, leave and become self employed and find out how hard the real world is.[/pullquote]It’s an interesting one. Should MR teams be retrieving bodies from farm accidents? Are police forces ‘farming out’ work to unpaid civilian volunteer teams?
The history of UK mountain rescue teams is usually rooted in a community response to incidents happening in their area. The first teams came about following the rise in popularity of mountaineering without a system of rescue and medical care being in place that could deal with the inevitable accidents. Mountaineering clubs gradually improved the skills and equipment they held through the early 20th Century, formalising first with the First Aid Committee of Mountaineering Clubs, which later became the Mountain Rescue Committee. The efforts of groups of mountaineers and clubs, often working alongside the RAF Mountain Rescue teams set up to deal with the rescue and recovery of downed aircrew, became the MR teams that are busy in the hills and mountains of the UK still. The underlying principle that linked them all is that they are “saving lives in wild and remote places” – the mission statement of Mountain Rescue England and Wales (although now missing from their website).
The role many of the teams under the Mountain Rescue England and Wales banner today is varied. The busiest teams in the U.K., such as Llanberis MRT work almost solely on callouts involving lost, missing or injured walkers, climbers and other mountain-goers. Occasionally they deal with other incidents in their are where their technical expertise is crucial in accessing those areas. The gradual rise in callouts over the last decade have been attributed to many things, from the increased popularity and success of tourism promotion or the new possibilities for finding hiking friends and groups that social media has allowed. Mobile phones, cheaper outdoor equipment or just more people wanting to experience the mountains for themselves have also been blamed. Whatever the reason, the busiest teams are generally getting busier.
The quieter teams tend to be away from the popular mountain and outdoor recreation areas. They may have hundreds or thousands of square miles of wild and remote terrain in their ‘patch’, but the operational tempo is a lot lower, numbering in single figures for some teams. However these teams still work to a professional standard, with the same equipment and the same unpaid volunteers trained to a level unmatched anywhere by a salaried job in the U.K.
UK rescue teams have become involved in high and low-profile incidents away from the mountains for many years now. Missing person searches in rural and urban areas, flooding and severe weather events, murder inquiries, technical rope and water rescues, crashed aircraft and a lot more besides that isn’t always public knowledge. A quick read through the newsfeed of Mountain Rescue England and Wales shows a number of non-mountain incidents peppered amongst the usual lost or injured walkers and climbers. Like the fire service, UK mountain rescue has evolved into a set of teams that perform a role the other emergency services cannot. Where this started is difficult to unpick though – how and why did mountain rescue drift away from the mountains and onto the streets and fields?
I think for most teams they could see something happening in their community, and they knew they had the skills and personnel to help. It may be a missing child or vulnerable person, or somebody in a situation that could be resolved using techniques honed in the wilderness. In the first instances at least. For some teams (and I must stress the ‘some’) the potential diversity in their role was a way of improving their awareness and getting some publicity for their relatively quiet teams. It’s all a question of cash…
Like all modern charities each mountain rescue teams have to run like a business, even if everybody involved is an unpaid volunteer giving dozens of hours each month (or week!). Their customer is the general public, whom they rescue without charge and (normally) without criticism. The customer pays for this service through fundraising and donations. Not everybody pays, but those who do drop a pound coin into the collection tin or bequeath hundreds of thousands of pounds to rescue teams essentially fund their operations. A small amount is now given to teams by various government funds, but the vast majority of rescue teams in England and Wales does comes from the general public. The problem is – who are you giving money to? Is it the team that you see fundraising in the local town centre but have otherwise never heard of, or the one you saw on the evening news the night before as the reports came in of a daring rescue of a family in terrible weather? I bet it’s the latter. If you live somewhere decidedly flat and travel to climb, hike or otherwise play in the mountains then you may donate to a team that covers the are you visit more often, but generally speaking the teams that receive the most donations are the ones with the highest profiles.
Some teams are quite literally millionaires, or very close. The operational costs of a rescue team can be from £50,000 to over £100,000 depending on what that team needs and what they buy for team members, and that is usually without the hidden costs that are absorbed by team members and their families. Fuel, personal equipment, lost work time and so on. All teams need those donations and you can donate to a more central fund, but this is a relatively new concept still and you can still see the differences in the funds each team raises on the Charity Comission website. It must be said however that the busiest team is not necessarily the richest – Llanberis Mountain Rescue team and Ogwen Valley Mountain Rescue Organisation share a border and have a similar number of incidents when averaged out over a number of years – but OVMRO are decidedly better off than LMRT. So is it public profile or incident frequency that leads to more donations? Or is the type of incidents responded to that tips the balance?
And does it matter? No. A team isn’t raising money to buy a yacht or to give back to shareholders – a team raises money to buy equipment, train personnel, maintain buildings and do something that nobody else can do.
I have some (limited, and gradually becoming less relevant) experience of this. I was a team member, then Training Officer then Deputy Team Leader of a North Wales Mountain Rescue team, and briefly Operations Officer for the regional association. During the time I was there the team evolved from mainly performing missing person searches in rural and semi-rural areas with the occasional rescue or recovery of a hiker, climber or other person in the mountains. The team actually covered the biggest area of any team in England and Wales, and also responded to requests for assistance from police forces in neighbouring English counties. A quick calculation gives me an area of approximately 8,000km² at the time I joined – later shrunk by the formation of lowland SAR teams in those counties. During my time there the team developed and improved it’s technical rope and water rescue skills and got involved in some ‘interesting’ incidents as a result – flooding and water incidents, rope rescues in quarries and steep slopes on the edge of town centres, major missing person searches that dominated the headlines for months and sever weather incidents like heavy snow. For a couple of evenings one winter the North Wales Mountain Rescue teams were effectively the only ambulance response available for most areas – the local ambulance trust just didn’t have vehicles that could respond. Another evening I sat for hours (snowed in) in the farmhouse, an Airwave radio set in one hand, a couple of phones in another and a laptop on my knee and coordinated the response of several teams in North Wales as they were rescuing stranded motorists from cars on lonely mountain passes, evacuating residents from remote houses and generally being selfless and saving lives. Other colleagues spent days in the North Wales Police control room acting as a point of contact and giving expert advice to all other agencies and performing a role nobody else there could do.
And that’s the answer – Mountain Rescue teams (and their Lowland equivalents) do work that the other emergency services just cannot. If every MRT in the UK decided to close up tomorrow there would be hole in the provision of care, rescue and emergency response that the other services cannot fill. By proving time and again they cannot be matched and by doing what they do well, with professionalism and with virtually no cost to the taxpayer they are bound to be called on to work away from the mountains – and they will respond because that’s what they do, and it helps them continue to do it. You cannot blame emergency services for calling on a resource that is professional, trustworthy, versatile and, crucially, free to fill in the gaps of what they can do. You cannot also blame teams for capitalising on the increased and diverse range of callouts to raise their profile and get more donations. It’s a symbiotic relationship that both parties created – if mountain rescue teams hadn’t continually offered their services and proven that they could do what others could not then they wouldn’t be called to do those things now.
To close, to be critical of frontline emergency services officers because they have expressed concerns over the way they are being used is missing every point. Their disquiet with the role they perform has little to do with the role that UK Mountain Rescue teams have come to perform. Responding to events away from the traditional theatre of mountains, crags and moorland IS the modern face of Mountain Rescue in the UK, it just varies from team to team. To tell them to “leave and become self employed and find out how hard the real world is” ignores the fact that nobody is forcing MRT members to be part of their team – just as nobody forces you to run your own business.
Mountain Rescue teams do something incredible, and so do police officers. If you attack either because of your (voluntary situation), you’re an idiot.
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Mountain General
Outdoor First Aid Course Report March 2016
Outdoor First Aid Course Report March 2016
we’ve been working witht he team of volunteers at the Brymbo Heritage Project near Wrexham for over 6 months on a few projects, but the one that has really inspired us has been the pilot of a new outdoor qualification and training scheme that we are going to be able to announce in the next few weeks. The very tail-end of that scheme was training in Outdoor First Aid for the volunteers – and we brought in the talented and lovely Teresa from event and remote-area medical specialists Ultramedix.
Here is the video of the course, with testimonials from some of the course delegates and clips from the training scenarios they were put through.
If you want to book your own private Outdoor First Aid Course in North Wales please get in touch.
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- Published in All Blog Posts, Bushcraft General, Course Reports, First Aid, Mountain General, Videos
VIDEO: Water-to-Go – the water filter bottle
VIDEO: Water-to-Go – the water filter bottle
We spotted Dave Shanks from Water-To-Go Ltd doing a demo of their water filtration bottle, turning dirty water into clean drinking water (with an excellent flow rate and inexpensive filter cartridge replacements!).
Finding safe, clean drinking water is always a priority whether you are on a planned wilderness/remote area trip or in an emergency situation. This product if used properly can make nearly every water source safe, without the hassle and restrictions some filtration systems have.
The 10th anniversary of the Outdoor Trade Show (OTS 2015) saw manufacturers, distributors and importers of the biggest outdoor brands in the UK come together to showcase their new and existing product lines to the outdoor trade.
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Mountain General, Outdoor Gear News and Reviews, Videos
How to join a mountain rescue team
How to join a Mountain Rescue team…
Whilst doing that awful but necessary thing of trawling through a long list of social media feeds earlier this week I came across this blog post from the Ordnance Survey – ‘Become a Search and Rescue Volunteer’.
At first glance, it seems to be all OK – references to a wide range of SAR volunteering opportunities and agencies, with references to the experiences and training policies of those agencies. All good.
Apart from the bits which are either made up, poorly researched (hopefully the author was presented with duff info) or just complete cobblers…
I spent the best part of a decade in a Mountain Rescue team in North Wales. I have blogged about it previously and occasionally we make reference to a certain skill or anecdote to demonstrate a point when teaching on a course. During my time in MR, I became the Training Officer and eventually a Deputy Team Leader so oversaw the recruitment procedures of both the team I was a member of, and other teams, for a number of years. I want to make clear here that my contribution to UK Mountain Rescue team world was insignificant – there are hundreds out there who have done a quarter-century or more volunteering for MRTs around the country. I did have a beard though…
As we occasionally get asked about joining an MRT by clients and others we work with, I think that my experience (and the experiences of our staff) would be valuable to those of you who are looking to join a mountain rescue team in the UK. I don’t claim that the guide below is definitive, but hopefully I have captured all of the relevant points. This guide is based on my experiences in an Mountain Rescue England and Wales team but most of the points should be relevant to Lowland SAR and other volunteer SAR teams.
1. Ask the team
This might seem obvious, but go and speak to your local team. If you don’t have a local team then you might have to move… (I do know people who have moved areas to be part of a team!).
Each team is an individual charity, and member of a regional organisation (which is also a charity) which in turn is a member of a Mountain Rescue England and Wales. Currently MREW is still largely a guidance and coordination body, representing the member teams at a national level and providing some centralised funding and training opportunities and advice on legal matters. As such, each team is (mostly) a law unto itself, with a unique identity and structure. The identity of the team is often created by the history of the team and the types of callout (‘job’) it is asked to assist with. In North Wales there are 6 MRTs, and each one is culturally distinct from its neighbours. The experience one would have joining one team would vary noticeably from the experience of joining another, even though their bases may be less than 5 miles apart as the crow flies…
By seeking out the members of a team (don’t stalk them, they don’t like that) then you will have the best chance of finding out directly what the recruiting procedures for that team are, when they recruit, what their requirements are and so on. For example, the team I was a member of required a good basic outdoor skillset (navigation, basic ropework, good fitness, good personal skills) plus the ability to turn up to 75% of training sessions (roughly 45 per year) and to assist with fundraising etc. The neighbouring team required a much higher personal technical ability but less in the way of commitment of time.
The best places to speak to the team you are looking to join are through their website (look for ‘Secretary’), their social media or by looking for places the team will be publicly displaying, such as a fundraising or publicity event. The worst times are:
- During a callout (this happened to me, whilst packaging a casualty into a stretcher prior to a helicopter evacuation!)
- In the pub – often the team will retire to their local after a callout or training session to unwind. Probably not the best time to be asking searching questions…
Teams are used to being asked these questions – often you will get re-directed to a certain page of their website or asked to submit a form. Most teams only recruit once a year so it may be several months before you hear anything more about your application.
2. Look at your own skills
Now you have (hopefully) found out what is likely to be required of you then you can examine what your skills are. Most teams have a multi-stage recruitment procedure, with an interview, practical skill assessment and probationary period before you are taken on as a full trainee. You will normally get good notice of these assessments/interviews, so use the time wisely. As above, the standards required for a hill recruit will vary from team to team, but the normal desired level for the ‘perfect’ recruit is:
- The ability to navigate in all weathers to an 8-figure grid reference from another 8-figure grid reference. This is to 10m accuracy, and slightly higher than normally required for outdoor navigation. This is the level we teach on our Intermediate Navigation course.
- The ability to tie several knots – including variations on the Figure of Eight, Clove Hitch, Italian Hitch, Bowline and French and Classic Prussiks.
- Knowing how to ‘look after yourself’ in the mountains. You are the people who come to assist those who have buggered things up – you are worse than useless if you don’t know how to regulate your own body temperature through use of your kit, how to cross a steep grass slope safely and just how to cope with poor weather and still function.
- How to work under direction as part of a team.
- Have a reasonable level of fitness. You don’t have to be a mountain athlete, but you will be expected to walk uphill with a reasonably heavy rucksack (15-18kg) without stopping every five minutes. If you can get from, say, Pen y Pass car park to the summit of Snowdon and back in less than 4 hours then you are in the right area.
- How to do all of the above in the dark. At 3am. When you have to be at work at 8:30am.
It is not crucial that you have ALL of the above skills, but it is a good target to aim for. The team will normally have a training procedure to ‘fill in the gaps’, whilst also giving you the specific technical skills required. In the weeks before my initial interview I was manicly practising my navigation whilst wearing a heavy rucksack. I kept a bit of rope by the toilet and practised my knots regularly – even though I had been climbing for several years! I soon discovered that the ropework in Mountain Rescue had little in common with climbing, and much more in common with industrial rope access.
3. Look at the jobs the team gets
A common ‘mistake’ made by prospective recruits at interviews I helped to conduct was that they knew little of what our team actually did. They had a general idea of Mountain Rescue being all about helicopters and hanging off cliffs, whereas the reality for our team was lots and lots of searching fields and woodland at night. In the rain. Whilst the missing person was happily asleep elsewhere, oblivious to the drama they were causing.
You can normally get a good feel for the types of jobs the team gets from its website, social media feeds and occasionally an ‘annual report’ it may publish. The teams that actually get involved in technical rescues on big hills every weekend are relatively few – most teams deal with missing person incidents, spot-pickups from rolling moorland and even water rescues. By having a good knowledge of the team and the jobs they get you can demonstrate that you are fully aware of what you intend to volunteer for, and what the team expects of you.
4. Speak to your family and employer
This is a big one, and often overlooked. When you join a Mountain Rescue team, your family join with you. People tend to get into trouble at mealtimes, just before bedtime and when you have booked to spend the day together with your significant other. Although it may be very exciting for you, your family may soon get tired of you buggering off into the night every time your phone goes bleep. You also have to keep a rucksack packed and in the boot of the car, your phone close to hand (most teams use SMS to alert their team members, not pagers these days) and maybe limit your evening alcohol intake. Whilst your attendance is not expected 100% of the time, most teams monitor attendance at training and callouts as there is little point having an experienced, skilled and valuable team member on the books who cannot turn up. Everybody in the team is in the same situation – which is why the inability to juggle ‘team life’ with real life is often cited as the reason for somebody having to resign. It was the same for me – there came a point where I had to decide if I was going to put more and more time (already 20+hrs a week) into ‘team life’ or into the business, and the business won.
Your employer may need to be supportive of you joining MR as you will be occasionally losing lots of sleep to the search for a missing person, or add the extra mileage to a company car. Most people in Mountain Rescue are self-employed, shift-workers or retired. We even developed a term for those who were able to turn up to jobs in the middle of the day during the working week – “Silver MR”…
5. Look at your bank balance
Mountain Rescue is expensive. Again, this varies from team to team, but usually you are expected to mostly supply your own kit. You will probably be outfitted with waterproofs, fleece and other protective clothing and maybe a helmet and harness. Your boots, rucksack, headtorch etc etc are usually down to you to provide. Fuel is rarely reimbursed (teams cannot afford to normally, particularly those with large areas to cover and few donations) nor is wear-and-tear on your vehicle. I calculated that being in Mountain Rescue cost me approximately £2-3,000 per year. Unless you live within running distance of the MR base, chances are that you will need an income of a certain level in order to take part.
6. Put in the time and be prepared to wait
For most teams, there is a waiting period between recruitment and actually hitting the ‘callout list’. This might be a few weeks, it might be a few months. It normally becomes frustrating, particularly in that period between feeling like you have reached the required standard, but the team still wants more from you. This is quite a good training experience for being an operational member – the saying “hurry up and wait” could have been coined just for volunteer SAR jobs. It is normal to go through the rush and hurry of getting to an RV, only to discover that crucial information still needs to be gathered before you can be deployed…
7. Look to the future
Okay, maybe this one is more about what happens after you join. Well, there are a number of ways you can progress within the Mountain Rescue world in the U.K., as loosely structured as it is. You can become trained to a high level of technical skill in rope and water rescue, learn advanced remote-area first aid procedures, study the mathematics and statistics of missing person behaviour or just become really, really good at loading and unloading a Land Rover.
There is a lot more I could say, but the guide above reflects the experiences of both my own time in MR and that of my staff, my friends and others we have spoken to. Most agree that it was much more involved and committing than they first anticipated, and that they had to adjust their expectations as they went. They also agree that they largely enjoyed the experience, but for one reason or another there came the time for them to leave and move on.
I hope some of the above helps.
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, Emergency and Safety, Mountain, Mountain General, Skills
The importance of experience in outdoor skills training
The importance of experience in outdoor skills training
This blog post is prompted by a few events of the last few weeks. The first was a discussion on a social media page about first aid courses, and the relative merits of choosing a provider who delivers a syllabus set by an awarding body, and one who delivers a syllabus based on experience of the subject and how it should be delivered. The second was sitting in on one of the 16hr Mountain and Outdoor First Aid courses delivered by Wayne from Blackhill Training, and the third was a chance meeting with another ‘bushcraft’ provider. My interpretation of these three distinct events all follow the same theme – how important is experience of the subject in delivering outdoor skills training?
It would be only fair to talk about myself first. My own experience is in a few limited fields – firstly as a freelancer leading groups of mainly adults in the mountains of the UK and in select places elsewhere around the world. Latterly this has mainly turned to leading bespoke trips, or more often, training groups and individuals in the skills they need to do these trips themselves. Alongside this was the best part of a decade spent as an operational team member in a North Wales mountain rescue team, and assisting with training and operational matters regionally and nationally. The short version of that is that I have spent ten years playing in the mountains and getting paid for it, and spending time in the mountains helping people and NOT getting paid for it. I take the development of my own personal skills seriously, and I am usually working on two or three projects at the same time which will hopefully have the outcome of improving my skillsets in one area or another.
Over the years we have developed a range of courses that reflect the skills we can confidently deliver based on the personal skills and experience of our team of instructors. We often run bespoke training courses where we bring in outside contractors to deliver a certain module, or even the whole course where it is appropriate. There are other courses or events we could run, but I won’t advertise a course until I feel confident that we have a syllabus and instructors who can not only match what the subject requires, but can confidently answer any questions that students may have – because they have ‘been there and done that’. There are two areas where we find that other providers choose to go through a different route, and these are First Aid training and ‘Bushcraft/Wilderness Skills’.
First Aid training is subject to different regulations (albeit slightly relaxed a year or so ago with regards to First Aid At Work provision) and most industries/areas of common interest work to similar standards. The standard required for most outdoor-relevant NGB (NAtional Governing Body) award schemes such as the Mountain Training awards is for “16hrs of outdoor-relevant first aid instruction”. There are literally hundreds of providers around the U.K., and every three years anybody who wants to continue to hold the NGB award and work under it need to ensure they stay ‘valid’ and renew their first aid training. Our Mountain and Outdoor first aid course delivered by Blackhill Training is one of the courses suitable for this, and we run at least one every year.
I’ve attended various courses over the years as a student, observer and ‘casualty’, and know plenty of other excellent providers. I also know several who have been running first aid courses for several years – yet have never used their skills ‘for real’. I will just let that sink in – there is an established training and qualification route to becoming a first aid training provider without ever going near a real patient/casualty. There IS a requirement to ensure that the training you deliver is relevant, up to date and appropriate for your students. But there’s no requirement to know what it feels like to perform a primary survey on a real person – to pull open their mouth gently and check for any obstructions to the airway, or to place your hand on their sternum whilst listening at their mouth for the tell-tale signs of the faintest of breaths.
The same is true for teaching ‘bushcraft’ (an area of the outdoor ‘industry’ that did not really exist in the UK 30 years ago). There are a few courses for becoming a ‘bushcraft instructor’ which are gradualy becoming more recognised, but no one course has become the recognised standard. There are no legal requirements for working under a certain qualification scheme, and it is often more of a case of finding an insurer who will recognise your individual training level. There is no requirement for having experience of practicing the skills you teach.
So what is the point of this aimless rambling? Well, the point is nothing other than my own personal view – that in order to effectively, safely and instinctively deliver good outdoor skills training you need direct experience of using those skills yourself, in a variety of situations and over an extended period of time.
As I said above, Original Outdoors aims to deliver training that is not only within the skills and experience of our instructors, but to do so in a way that our clients and students can relate to. As the 14 students who attended our Mountain and Outdoor first aid course with Blackhill Training will no doubt testify, Wayne draws extensively on his past in the British Army and in Mountain Rescue, as well as work as a private medic, to illustrate certain points and techniques. I do the same when I teach, making reference to stories (amusing, cautionary or otherwise) or anecdotes that are (hopefully!) interesting and relevant to what I am going through with students. We both have to be careful that these don’t become sessions of ‘War Stories’ (“this one time, at band camp…”) of casualties with unusual injuries and having to come up with interesting solutions to problems that arose during a trip. Over the years you develop a kind of filter for these tall tales – discussions on major hemorrhage or fecal impaction are not suitable for the dinner table apparently.
Teaching without direct experience of what performing tasks with those skills feels like is at best dishonest and at worst dangerous. If your experience in that skill is watching an instructor do it, then continually practicing until you are able to repeat it time after time you are not ready to teach it – only display one version of it. It is my opinion that unless you have used a skill ‘for real’ – be it a lifesaving medical technique or just lighting a fire in the rain because you need the heat from it to pass the night in any kind of comfort – then you need to consider carefully whether you will be able to adequately share that skill with others. There are some things which it is difficult to get first hand experience of. Survival techniques are a good example – if you keep needing to employ desperate survival skills then you need to re-examine your planning!
So what does the outdoor student do to find instructors who have the experience to back up what they teach? Here are a few tips based on my observations:
- Look at their history – most instructors who sell themselves under their own name will have an ‘About Us/Me’ section of their website or course literature. Their background should reflect the skills they are teaching – this doesn’t mean that you need an ex-member of UK Special Forces Group to teach you navigation and expedition skills, but an experienced mountain leader with several overseas trips to interesting places of the world would be a good choice.
- Look at the course and how it is run – if you want to have a ‘taster’ day or session in a given skill then there are dozens of courses and providers out there. If you want to learn a skill or set of skills that could save your life one day (or prevent a calamity that would endanger it) then you should choose a course which publishes a course syllabus, and is run in an appropriate environment. There are surprisingly large number of ‘bushcraft’ providers who operate from a scrubby patch of hedgerow or in the middle of a caravan park or tourist attraction.
- Look at what others said – If a course is established and there is past history of clients it is likely that there are reviews and testimonials online, either on the website of the course provider or their social media feeds, or on blogs and third-party sites. These should give you an insight to the way the course is delivered, and who delivers it.
At the end of the day it is your money and time that is initially on the line. If you choose poorly you could end up with an instructor who is only a few pages ahead of you in the proverbial ‘textbook’ and a course that doesn’t achieve what you need it to. If you choose wisely you will find yourself learning a set of valuable skills, but also being pushed in the right direction to continue your learning.
A phrase that really does annoy me is the old cliche – “Those who can, do and those who cannot, teach”. In my experience those who can, do, and those who can do things very well end up teaching. Unfortunately there are plenty who teach who have neither ‘done’ or will ever ‘do’.
Clear? No? Ah well, maybe I need more practice…
- Published in All Blog Posts, Articles, Bushcraft General, First Aid, Mountain General