Should North Shore Rescue teams get more medical training? Study’s finding raises question | 24CA News
Half of the calls responded to by North Shore Rescue over 25 years had been so critical, a affected person wanted in-hospital medical evaluation, a brand new examine has discovered.
The evaluation of search and rescue incident reviews on the North Shore Mountains between 1995 and 2019 was revealed this 12 months within the peer-reviewed Wilderness & Environmental Medicine journal.
Its findings recommend there may be want for “evidence-based guidelines and core training competencies” in drugs for mountain search and rescue groups.
“We train hard and we train for what we see,” mentioned co-author Dr. Alec Ritchie, an emergency room doctor at Lions Gate Hospital and North Shore Rescue’s medical workforce lead.
“Now that we know what we see, that’ll influence the type of training we do, what type of equipment we try to get, fundraising requests and that sort of thing.”
The analysis workforce scoured practically 2,100 calls and included 906 topics, 65 per cent of whom had been males, within the evaluation. The high three actions concerned within the instances studied had been climbing, biking and snow sports activities.
Researchers used the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics severity rating to grade whether or not incidents had been categorized as medically traumatic. Fifty-four per cent fell underneath the class of “trauma,” with the highest three physique areas impacted being the decrease limbs, the top and the torso.
Other calls had nothing to do with sports activities however concerned different critical, unrelated medical points for which remedy was distant. Of the incidents deemed “non-traumatic,” the examine discovered psychological well being crises, publicity and cardiovascular incidents had been the highest three causes of rescue calls.
“By non-trauma, I mean a medical issue that is not caused by an accident or force,” Ritchie defined on 980 CKNW’s The Jill Bennett Show on Thursday afternoon.
“With 41 per cent being non-trauma, we were quite surprised.”
North Shore Rescue is a volunteer-based search and rescue workforce that operates day by day of the 12 months as one of many oldest of its form in Canada. It responds to about 130 calls per 12 months.
All of its volunteers have first help coaching, Ritchie mentioned, and the superior medical workforce is out there to deal with extra extreme medical calls.
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