Support with emergency shelters to help provide hands on training when faced with facial trauma in extreme environments.
For those looking to take their medical paths into the more remote and extreme environments, whether for search and rescue, expedition or disaster relief, then it is essential to be able to provide hands on, practical training that can help simulate potentially difficult scenarios that may be faced.
Burjor Langdana is from Wilderness Dentistry and he got in touch with the Alpkit Foundation looking for support towards workshops they help run that cover aspects around the primary management of facial trauma, particularly in austere environments.
“We do facial trauma workshops for Search and Rescue, Mountain Cave Rescue, Offshore, SOF and for Masters program with World Extreme Medicine & Royal College Glasgow. One of the modules is transportation of a casualty with facial trauma. Two things hard to replace in an injured person is blood and heat. Prevention of heat loss is one of the things we focus on in our facial trauma workshops. We explain the importance of heat loss from a stationary, non active casualty. Preventing radiant heat loss by increasing the ambient environment temperature, conductive heat loss through wind and rain protection.
To be able to teach important techniques in controlling the environment when faced with a casualty in difficult situations, they needed to have access to suitable equipment. With workshops taking place for the British Mountain Medicine Society, Ambleside & Langdale MSAR, Special Forces, World Extreme Medicine and Remote Area Risk International, it was a real privilege to be able support these.
We all love the outdoors and what it can offer. Adventures big or small, simple or extreme. Yet we know it comes with levels of risk, whether on Lake District mountains or depths of the Arctic wilderness. Of course we never want to call on them, but knowing that support is there from medical and rescue teams is reassuring.
Burjor explained a bit more about the significance of this training.
“Understanding the importance of wetness is crucial. Water conducts heat 25 times faster than air, resulting in conductive heat loss from 2 to 5%. As the casualty gets cold it causes biochemical changes within the body that delays the speed of blood clot formation, increasing bleeding and making it more difficult to stop it. A cold casualty has increasing risk of infection and would worsen the outcome of traumatic brain injury."
"However when dealing with a casualty having multiple injuries and / or multiple casualties. The critical care providers can have increasing tunnel vision and decreasing band width. They may forget the principles of “ Shelter before exposure “ or “ Bivy before bandages “
Hence it’s important during training. We train hands on. We train with the real stuff in real time. Thanks to the Alpkit Foundation we are now able to train our casualty packaging and transportation procedure under cover of the Kapar 8 emergency shelter.
This focused training will result in memory and procedural reinforcement. So that when faced with an actual incident, their formative response will benefit the casualty, improving the outcome.”
If you're interested in finding out more about training and routes into more adventurous medicine, check out the following.