Blogs highlighting the work of staff and volunteers within the British Red Cross, part of the largest humanitarian organisation movement in the world.
By Brad Smith
March 25, 2010 at 9:58 am
Last night, at my local Red Cross centre meeting, we were on week three of a casualty simulation course.
This involves giving us the skills necessary to create realistic and long-lasting wounds that are feasible, acheiveable, believeable and accurate. I think I managed at least one of those last night! And it certainly involved blood. It didn’t really have any guts or gore.
I’ll admit, making up wounds is not the favourite aspect of my volunteering career. When I’m training, I normally rely on the artistic prowess of one of my colleages to provide the necessary wounds for our training sessions and scenarios. However, by the end of last night’s session, I was giving it a go and managed to come up with a fairly realistic wound involving a shard of glass and lots of blood. Sadly, I don’t have good enough photographic evidence to prove it.
I’m off on ambulance duty this weekend. Fingers crossed I don’t have any real blood loss incidents to deal with, as I always hope for quiet duties. At least I’ve reminded myself what to look out for following last night’s practice!
Update: unfortunately my ambulance duty has just been cancelled, so I’m pretty sure I won’t see any more real blood, guts and gore for a while yet.. touch wood.
Image © British Red Cross/ Alex Rumford
Tags: casualty simulation, first aid training
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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 9:58 am and is filed under First aid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Brad is a Red Cross first aider. He covers first aid duties and crews ambulances for our event first aid service. He also provides Red Cross first aid training.
Other posts by Brad Smith
The British Red Cross values comments both complimentary and critical. However, we will not tolerate the following: aggressive or personal criticism of the blogger, breach of copyright, obscene, defamatory, profane, sexually oriented, racially offensive or likewise objectionable comments.
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