Philip Withnall on behalf of 3 CUHWC members, February 2016

Anyone can have an accident at any time – it’s a sad fact of life. Knowing first aid skills relevant to dealing with an accident is really important: as well as potentially saving a life, you’ll also feel much more comfortable and confident out and about.

REC 2 is all about basic steps to take to preserve life and aid recovery, with a heavy slant on first aid in the outdoors where resources may be limited and help be some time away.

Skills acquired:

• First aid kit – equipment to pack in different situations.
• Concrete first aid techniques – First response procedure (DRABC), CPR, recovery position, choking, log roll, dressing injuries, tourniquets, epi-pens, etc. Also more generalised advice on hypothermia, stroke, burn, diabetes, tics and more.
• Practice in first response and preliminary diagnosis with lots of simulated first aid situations.
• Legal / procedural aspects of providing first aid and medicine – very useful as (Arion is the) incoming safety officer. Would recommend to future incoming safety officers if they don't already have this experience.

Good and bad points about the course:

• Being an outdoors course, the scenarios were all really relevant to hillwalking and climbing. Being on the course with other outdoors-y people meant lots of people had their own experiences to share.
• Lots of practical work – practising techniques on dummies and real people, and extended injury simulations which were very useful in synthesising these techniques.
• Tangentially, it was good to practise using an epi-pen (+other brands) as I can never remember which way up it goes!
• The trainer was experienced and we got a lot of practical training, a bit more on hypothermia would have been nice.