First Aid in the Outdoors (WFA)
By Jared Caldwell, CEO and Training Center Director, TELSSI, Inc
How many times have you been in the wilderness and seen someone unprepared or ill-suited to the adventure upon which they were embarking (I’ve been climbing “fourteeners” in Colorado and actually seen people in sandals with knapsacks)? Have you ever been at a traditional campsite and wondered how many people had ever taken so much as a basic first aid course? Do you live where you experience natural disasters affecting services in your area which could extend the time required to reach a functional hospital more than an hour? Do you perform Rescue work but do not have the ability or desire to take higher levels of emergency medical care? The reality is, most people have never had first aid beyond what they learned growing up (pour some hydrogen peroxide on it, wipe with rubbing alcohol, slap on a band-aid) or years ago in Boy or Girl Scouts (probably outdated).
Wilderness First Aid is the first step toward ensuring that you are able to handle situations so that you, your family, or friends are able to manage basic emergency medical incidents in which you are more than an hour (possibly even days) from a hospital. In popular rock climbing locations like the Flatirons outside Boulder, Colorado for example (where you can see the hospital when you are climbing on the rock) an injury can be a day long extraction by Search and Rescue. Basic First Aid (focused on urban settings- generally workplace- with access to immediate advanced medical care) is a bare minimum necessity. Wilderness First Aid is a must for those who spend any amount of time in the outdoors, or who live or work in an area which could result in delayed times to definitive care. Living in Denver we frequently get snowstorms which can make access to the hospital (which is just 1 mile from my home) in the winter; often times the metro area becomes classified as a “wilderness” for Basic Life Support and First Aid purposes.
Consider taking a Wilderness First Aid course in your area. I recommend an ASHI course for its quality and affordability (Health and Safety Institute- the parent company of American Safety and Health Institute is the world’s third largest and established BLS training company behind American Heart Association and Red Cross). Their curriculum is written by Steve Donelan who also develops Wilderness Emergency Care courses such as Wilderness First Responder, Wilderness EMT, and the National Ski Patrol’s Outdoor Emergency Care course. It also makes you a functional part of the chain of care (making your transition to higher levels of training easier should you later choose to pursue them). In the end, it matters less from where you get certified (although, I certainly would like to be involved in the process), and more that you have it. This is a numbers game folks, and the more trained people in the inevitability of an emergency, the higher our likelihood of a positive outcome.
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