Expedition First Aid Course

As part of our generous support from the Imperial College Expedition Board five members of the Paddle Peru team completed an expedition first aid course this weekend. Although we hopefully won’t have to make use of the skills that we learned, the remote nature of the Peruvian rivers mean they may prove invaluable.

Adam, Alex, Alby, Derf and Tom arrived in various states of wakefulness on Saturday morning and were plunged straight into an exercise designed to test how much of the outdoor first aid course we could remember (not a lot in my case). Revision time over we set about learning some more complex techniques including use of resuscitation masks, defibrillators and oxygen.  After a beautifully sunny lunch the information continued to come thick and fast, with an overview of the various illnesses we may be vulnerable to on the trip and the drugs that would be most useful to us. Saturday culminated in learning more advanced techniques to control bleeding, with some team members enjoying finding each others femoral pressure point a little too much...

On the Sunday we learned a number of the more practical first aid skills. After a quick lesson each of us was presented with a horribly injured patient (a chicken leg) and a suturing kit. With varying degrees of success we then stitched up its terrible wound. With this casualty dealt with we then encountered a whole bag of oranges in need of life saving injections. Luckily these were successfully administered, and we even managed to avoid sticking needles into ourselves. 

Our final challenge was to combine all that we had learned on the last two first aid courses into a single scenario. In groups of three we had to effectively manage an incident, triage patients and administer appropriate care. This provided a real insight into the challenges of dealing with a major incident and an opportunity to prove to ourselves how much we had learned.

We would like to thank Stuart Marshall and Dr Simon Green from Marlin Training (www.marlintraining.co.uk) for providing us with excellent tuition and the Imperial College Expedition Board for funding this invaluable course.