Upcoming courses...

The next Wilderness Emergency Medicine First Aid Provider (1-day) is on the 30 May 2014 and the next Wilderness Emergency Medicine (2-day) is on the 14-15 June 2014. Please email wildernessemergencymedicine@yahoo.com for further details.

Course feedback 12-13 April 2014

Another successful Wilderness Emergency Medicine course was run at the Kenneth Stainbank Nature Reserve in Durban. Awesome interactive lectures from emergency medicine, survival, pre-hospital medicine and rescue experts, interspersed with scenarios that the candidates had to run. The use of high-fidelity simulations was a new component to the course this year and added a fresh approach to teaching integrated aspects of patient care and rescue in the austere wilderness field.

Instructors' meeting

The instructors got together tonight thanks to the advantages of social networking tools and had a very productive planning meeting for the course this weekend. In discussions, I realised that the internet, and more especially, social media can be a very useful tool in the development of the field of Wilderness Emergency Medicine. It certainly has a role to play in marketing and now in interpersonal interactions at the academic level. I have been witness to the development of the FOAMed philosophy of education in emergency medicine and critical care, and am eager to try the same for wilderness emergency medicine as well. Therefore, I will be exploring ways in which social media can be used to advance the field of WEM.

Back from nowhere

So it's been a while since my last blog post and it's fast approaching the next Wilderness Emergency Medicine course this weekend. People may think that running a course is fairly easy to set up and run, but when you are setting up a course from scratch and doing everything yourself, it is quite a daunting task. However, the satisfaction rests with a successful exercise with candidates learning much from the instructors and ultimately having a great time in the field. Taking feedback from the last course in September 2013, I have changed the course dramatically, adding in several practical high-fidelity scenarios, and decreasing the number of didactic lectures, making the course more practical. There are also lots of demonstrations within the lecture components. This is going to be a very new and different and certainly a very exciting event. There are also a few new candidate instructors and observers who will be evaluated as instructors, hoping to increase the faculty for this programme.