Emergency First Aid: having the skills to save a life

As part of our quality of client care, most allied health practitioners maintain their annual CPR. But what about your first aid skills?

Q: Given our range of deadly snakes and V8 lawnmowers with fins, what animal kills the most humans each year? (answer below)

As a kick off you will most likely enjoy this if you haven't already viewed - "Video Come to Australia"

As part of our quality of client care, most allied health practitioners maintain their annual CPR. But what about your first aid skills?

Q: Given our range of deadly snakes and V8 lawnmowers with fins, what animal kills the most humans each year? (answer below)

As a kick off you will most likely enjoy this if you haven't already viewed - "Video Come to Australia"

If you have an interest in first aid, commute outside metro areas or like to travel to remote locations for prospecting, camping, surfing, fishing or cave diving, then you may like to consider a course that Melissa and I have just completed.

Called the Remote Emergency Course, it is three days in length and primarily designed for nurses and medical practitioners (we were the first physios that had attended which did surprise me).

The course is conducted around Australia and run by Cranaplus, an organisation that provides training with a rural and remote focus. The presenters were nurses with exceptional depth of experience in remote nursing, flight nursing (RFDS), emergency and mass disaster nursing. Sure, a lot of the information was out of scope for physios (think putting up saline drips, medication selection and indwelling catheters), but we did everything that was taught. So decompressing a tension pneumothorax, learning to place intravenous cannula in the arm and intraosseous cannula in the tibia, inserting an intercostal catheter/drain, performing a needle thyroid-cricoidectomy and being a part of a resuscitation team using a manual defibrillator.

In addition to learning some very valuable emergency skills for envenomation, maternity, paediatric, the unconscious and short of breath patients, the course cemented my DRsABCD EFGHIJ knowledge (basic life support) and was a unique opportunity to cross pollinate physio scope of practice with remote emergency nursing scope of practice. Hats off to the attending nurses that we met on the course, they were a terrific mob, exceptionally welcoming, inclusive and very supportive. And a massive thank you to the great education team of Annie, Rosie, Rosemary, Andrew and Sarah.

Some apps to consider for your phone:

First Responder (St John) https://stjohnwa.com.au/online-resources/st-john-f... - shows nearest defibrillators, basic CPR and management of first aid situations

Emergency+ (Federal Govt)http://emergencyapp.triplezero.gov.au/ - maps your current location and phone numbers for emergency services (police, Healthdirect, SES, Poisons Centre)

MD Calcs https://www.mdcalc.com/ - a calculation app (area of burns, profiling for heart attack risk, DVT or pulmonary embolism, glasgow coma scale)

I would highly recommend this course to any person that travels outside of metropolitan areas and wanting to develop vital lifesaving skills.

Just ask yourself, if I drove around a corner and came face to face with a rolled 4-wheel drive, would I want to actively assist or be a passive bystander?

Course locations and details are here https://crana.org.au/education/courses/programs/remote-emergency-care/. They usually fill 6-12 months in advance.

A: The humble horse (10-12 deaths per year)