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| CPR or PR? We didn't spend too much time on this, but it was good to recap |
I spent a weekend in Oxford in mid-February on a weekend Far From Help better-than-first-aid course. It was run by Wilderness Medical Training and I was there as a guest – commercial director Barry Roberts (who has climbed Everest no less) invited me along. He writes for Cross Country from time to time, and has contributed a feature for the March/April issue.
As well as the learning – which left me much more confident than I was before in how to approach situations and deal with medical emergencies – what was of interest were the war stories of all the other participants. Lots of them were trek leaders heading out to the Himalaya or the jungle, while others were training for big events – one guy was off to run six marathons in six days through the Sahara.
The course was classroom based, and run by a specialist doctor, Dr Tariq Quereshi, with an assistant (also a doctor). The advice was simple and straightforward, and most importantly for me, memorable. Instead of lots of advice about how to diagnose a back injury, for example, we were told, "If he's had a fall and has a head injury, then assume the patient has a neck/spinal injury too".
Other highlights including running through drugs and antibiotics and how to administer them (people who complete the course can order antibiotics through WMT) and a brushing up of altitude medicine. A 45 minute update of CPR was sobering: the statistics show, our course leader said, that CPR in wilderness situations is more PR than anything else. There are no, or certainly very few, examples of where it has actually worked. Where there is access to a defibrillator however, it can be useful. Again, it was all about simplicity: start pumping first and go 30 to 2 and that's it.
What I also realised is that I am now very old! There were a couple of 20-year-old students from Oxford university there, about to head off to Iceland. I felt my age as I pretty much had a story about everything we covered – broken limbs, back injuries, head injuries, fits, cuts, altitude, frostbite etc. A good weekend.
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