Rendezvous Eleven – Med Class

After checking-in and unloading and unpacking, I took the down-elevator and in the lobby ran-into Mike and Kiwi and Bill and Lucky Gunner’s rep Anthony Welsch, then Aaron showed-up and later Miles. They all piled into Anthony’s rental vehicle while I drove solo in the F-150, and we headed out to Reno Guns & Range for our Emergency Medical Range Training class.
The class was lead by a well-experienced former EMT and former Flight-EMT and former Reno motor officer and EMT Trainer and former multi-deployment overseas warrior-EMT – all just one guy named Derek.
He made an important distinction between the “Medical Kit” and its components of: a Compression bandage, wound Dressings, Hemostatic agents, and a Tourniquet – versus a “First-Aid Kit” with band-aids, tape, gauze and eye-wash, etc. for minor wound care.
From my recent RSO class I also appreciated his re-iteration of the need for assigning or designating different people to certain specific tasks when an emergency-event occurs — and the importance of a short Range Safety Briefing when training activities are taking place, where you identify the Medical Kit, put it in a convenient place, BY ITSELF, and show everyone the location of the Kit so they won’t be sprinting around the range like a chicken when something Unpleasantly Medical happens.
2.) To designate a medic person you grab someone and say, “You are the Medic!” From the Briefing you should have already identified this potential medic-person, and they are not the one having the accident.
3.) Designate a phone-caller you grab someone else and say, “You call 911!” AND have a ready-scripted dialog for the EMS dispatcher to respond-to, so they don’t send police first and cordon off the area before allowing the EMS van on-scene. Say: “We have had a training accident.” They ask, “What kind of training accident?” Say: “We have a person with a bullet injury…” Also that phone-person must have the coordinates or a good description of your location. ALSO FYI if a patient has a penetrating wound to the: Head, Neck, Chest, Abdomen – then they are UNSTABLE and it would be good to include that information.
4.) AND designate an escort-person, someone to go to the location-entrance, meet the EMS van, and guide them to the medical-site.
And there were some more designations I forget.
Following that he discussed (and we Q&A’d) about wound treatment itself, the order of priorities and application of care. FIRST you must protect yourself. You must have barrier safety-equipment: nitrile gloves and an air-way shield. Then the application of pressure to control bleeding. With gloves-on comes direct pressure, then a sterile DRESSING directly onto wound, then another dressing as necessary if bleeding continues, and then a pressure BANDAGE such as the “Israeli Bandage” that wraps the dressing IN PLACE and ALSO applies pressure – and if bleeding still continues, then the TOURNIQUET…
It was a really good class, and obviously I could take it again in order to remember everything better.
But enough for now.