I completed this course last week and here's a review.
The online portion took about 8 hours to do consisting of videos, presentations, homework, textbook reading, and quiz. Most of it covered assessing a victim.
The top.priorities when testing a victim is
Scene safety - like rockfalls, cliffs, etc. You may have to movie the patient away or leave the patient there if things are too dangerous.
Use the abbreviation MARCH to check and treat injuries in order: Massive hemorrhaging, airway, respiration, circulation, and hyper/hypo thermia.
The lesson then goes into secondary assessment and tasks ike vital signs, allergies, drugs, mental state, broken bones, what happened, spinal injuries, etc. There's a 150 page book you have to read that goes over injuries and how to assess and treat them.
A full assessment is crazy and goes.into minute detail with many complicated abbreviations to go through. Its purpose is to figure out what's causing the problem, especially for an unconscious person. It's hard to remember it all, but they give a cheat sheet for it. The online course was okay, but I'd rather do it in a classroom.
Day 2 was in person at Bellows. The four instructors were local physicians and emergency room surgeons who were active in the outdoors activities. There were 30 students..some regular people, some from CERT and OSAR, UH med students, and hikers.
We went through a review of the assessments learning how it applies to their real world experiences. Very interesting hearing their stories and it made what we were learning be more impactful.
Next we learned how to transport victims with carries and drags, and building improvised litters out of tarps, poles, backpacks, and other commonly found items when hiking and backpacking. Neatest carry was 2 people with backpacks put poles inside of the straps to make a seat. The victim sits on the poles between the 2 rescuers.
Then we worked on CPR, tourniquets, bandages, and other treatments. And finally we did scenarios to assess
, treat, and carry a patient. Since this is wilderness aid when help is hours or days away, CPR is only recommended for lightning strike and cold exposure, two instances where people can be revived from CPR alone. Otherwise it is futile when responders are hours away.
I enjoyed the class but would've preferred an all inperson class. My last advanced medical class was combat lifesaver, a 5 day class(?) 15 years ago and this was a well needed refresher. We didn't go over decompression needles or IVs or other more.advanced techniques, but it was still good for a 2 day class especially when there are no other options.
I want to take the 40 hour TCCC class. It was supposed to be free under grants here but COVID cancelled that class a couple years ago. Dark Angel and Sig Sauer Academy have tactical aid care classes on the mainland too.
