Wilderness
First Responder (WFR) & Wilderness EMT Upgrade (WEMT) To be scheduled
WFR/WEMT is a professional-level course that
trains you to understand and avoid wilderness hazards and cope with emergencies
anywhere. You learn how to assess injuries and medical or environmental
problems, and do emergency care with whatever you have on hand or can improvise.
So this course also prepares you for disaster situations, when emergency
medical services and hospitals are overwhelmed or inaccessible. We use vivid
slides and interactive teaching methods to bring the topics to life. Skills practice is intensive. Realistic simulated accidents help you put your skills
together and develop your leadership abilities.
Certifications: Participants
who are currently certified as EMT’s or Paramedics receive WEMT
certification
on graduation; other participants receive WFR certification. National
Association for Search and Rescue (www.nasar.org) certifications are
recognized throughout
the United States and in many other countries. To be certified, you must complete all skills training and skills
logs, and pass the exams. Wilderness topics and skills are the same for WFR and
WEMT, but EMT’s and Paramedics are already trained in urban emergency care,
especially in assessing medical problems and life support techniques.
Instructor: Steve Donelan, NREMT, developed his Wilderness Emergency Care program and is the author of the textbook. He is section editor on
education for Wilderness &
Environmental Medicine (www.wms.org), and
a peer reviewer of several standard textbooks. He has published many articles
on emergency care and how to teach it.
Schedule: WFR is about 80 class hours, WEMT Upgrade about 40 class hours.
Textbook: Wilderness Emergency Care, Third Edition Revised is available from Amazon and NASAR.
Course materials: You will need a SAM splint, which you can buy from the instructor in class at wholesale cost ($10), and a stethoscope.
What
is wilderness?
For the purpose of emergency care,
wilderness means any situation where advanced care and additional resources are
out of reach or unavailable, because you are at a remote location (more than 2
hours or so from help) or because a major disaster has overwhelmed the medical
system.
Environmental
hazards
You will learn about the effects of heat, cold, altitude, solar radiation, and lightning on
the body: Prevention, assessment, and treatment.
Biological
hazards
Bugs, snakes, bears, aquatic hazards, plants,
contaminated water: What can they do to you and how can you protect yourself? What about
diseases that mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas can transmit? And how can you
disinfect water in the wilderness?
Wilderness
wound care
In a wilderness situation, you need to clean and disinfect wounds, and apply bandages that will
stay on as the patient walks, skis, scrambles, or is evacuated out. So you will
learn and practice far more bandaging techniques than EMTs and other medical professionals do.
Wilderness
fracture & dislocation management
You will learn how to align
angulated fractures, reduce dislocations, and use various commercial and
improvised splints for fixation and traction splinting. You will also learn how
to align a patient with possible spinal injuries who is found in a bent or
twisted position (seldom taught in EMT or paramedic courses).
Medical problems in the wilderness
You
will learn how to assess medical problems in wilderness situations,
what you can do about them, and how to decide if they require an
evacuation.
Wilderness
extrication & transport
You will learn how to build sleds
and litters to evacuate patients from the wilderness.
Improvise
Above all, you will learn how to
improvise care with whatever you have or can find in the wilderness.