First Aid Training

Today was first aid training for 10 of our Walking Festival volunteers.

Richard Holmes is our regular trainer. As always, he was full of very useful tips and tricks to deal with the incidents we may encounter on the hills. The training would be better called "incident management" because we can't expect non medical people to know about every medical emergency that can happen.

In the afternoon, we had some new role play scenarios that I had devised. The first was Ann, with a nasty fracture of one humerus. We chose a team of three and the other volunteers pretended to be walkers on the walk. They were brilliant in the way they tried to get involved and had to be moved away from the incident. Ann was in such distress due to the pain that it was hard to persuade her to come out of role at the end.

Then Kevin, pictured here, had a heart attack on a walk. He was conscious at first, but then had a cardiac arrest. Amazingly the first aiders were able to bring him back from the brink of death while others were calling for the rescue helicopter!

My turn was last. I slipped on the hillside and banged the back of my head on a rock, resulting in lots of blood. (Scalp wounds can be so messy.) I was unconscious and they put me in the recovery position. When I came to, I was confused and wanted to sit up. To my complete suprise, the team pinned me down to the ground........... Was that because an ex-police officer was one of them? I could not get up - they held me tight. We agreed afterwards, that this was not the best course of action.

It was a very useful learning exercise for everyone involved!!!!

Our volunteers are just wonderful and were very good sports today.