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Diary - April 2008
Tuesday 8th April 2008 19:30hrs – Casualty Care Training
First Monday night of the month is Cas Care night, except tonight when its Tuesday, oh and technically its the second Tuesday of the month. But no matter eh! Dr Ian was due to be giving us a talk tonight, but couldn’t make it in the end, so instead we are having a round robin practicing with some of the kit we use.
We had various pieces of kit to play with, including the vacuum splints, the stretcher and the TED – a device for extracting people with spinal injuries from difficult locations. We then went on to have a bit of bandaging practice, which looking at the standard of my efforts, was a bit overdue.
Sunday 13th April 2008 09:00hrs – Downfall Race Cover
Today is the Kinder Downfall Fell race and we are providing cover. We had to turn up at the hut in order to get out on to the hill for an 11am start. Teams were sorted out and given assignments, which mainly involved walking to a remote part of Kinder and waiting around for a few hours until the race was over. I looked around to find out what I would be doing, only to find out that I had been allocated the task of driving for the day. This would mean dropping the teams off and then waiting around half way up the hill on my own until they returned. The teams we ready to go out, so I set off with them in one of the Land Rovers, grabbing a book on knot tying from the team bookshelf as I left.
I dropped the teams off and then had an afternoon of sitting around and chatting to passing walkers and Mountain Bikers. Fortunately Dave had left us with a paper exercise on how to organise a callout. This passed some time as I deployed imaginary search parties, however once I had finished this, it was back to how to tie knots!
Eventually, after most of the runners had charged down hill, on their way to the finish line, one of the teams arrived back at the Land Rover. I then had the pleasure of listening to them debate their ideas for the paper deployment exercise, while they had their lunch.
Finally we rounded up the other teams and along with the other Land Rover, brought them all back to base.
Wednesday 16th April 2008 19:30hrs – Training
A different training session tonight. Darren is running us through the lifecycle of a callout. We were told to turn up with our callout gear, but to leave it in the car for later. The purpose of the session was to give us an idea of what goes on behind the scenes during a callout.
We started out with a callout scenario of a couple of injured walkers stuck on kinder. It was unusual to watch every part of the callout. As the casualties phoned for help, we got to watch the call come through to the controller and on to Neale, who paged the team. At this point every phone in the room started ringing and we were sent out to get our gear. The rest of the evening was spent going through the processes of deploying teams out to the casualties and thinking through where to place the team resources.
It was interesting to watch the callout from all sides and useful to work
out how to remove those small delays which can soon add up to slow down
the team response.
Friday 25th April 2008 19:30hrs – Team Meeting and AGM
Tonight’s meeting was a double header. We had our Annual General Meeting before the regular team meeting. The AGM is where we elect the team’s executive officers each year. In past years this meeting has been a long drawn out affair, where each officer reads out a summary of everything they have done over the past year. This time they had been sent out by e-mail, so we didn’t have to go through them on the night. To speed things up even further there was only one person standing for each role, so they were all elected unapposed.
This meant that we started the regular meeting early and as there wasn’t
too much to discuss, it was almost over before it was due to start! This
seemed to be an excellent way of conducting these meetings, as it left much
more time available for socialising.