Minimum Guidelines and Standards for Wilderness First Aid

Abstract

Wilderness emergencies may require you to recognize and cope with a variety of medical problems or environmental hazards, improvise bandages or splints for injuries to different parts of the body, or extricate and carry victims from difficult terrain as well as water. All of these topics and skills were included in American Red Cross Standard First Aid & Personal Safety, 2nd Edition, published in 1979. American Red Cross Advanced First Aid & Emergency Care, 2nd Edition, used in the courses taught until 1993, also included techniques for extricating a victim with spinal injuries from water and lowering from a height—skills not found even in urban emergency medical technician (EMT) courses. But students in most urban Basic First Aid courses today practice no skills except a pressure bandage for bleeding control, using a dummy EpiPen, and perhaps applying a simple splint. And students in 60-hour Emergency Medical Response courses practice only a fraction of the skills that were taught in Advanced First Aid. First aid training for civilians who are not medical professionals began in 1878, when 2 British military officers started classes under the auspices of the St. John Ambulance Association, based on what they had been teaching to military stretcher-bearers. In New York City, the first classes for civilians were taught by volunteer doctors in 1880. In 1908, Major Charles Lynch (a US Army Medical Officer) prepared a first aid textbook for the American Red Cross (ARC), which started classes for the public (taught by volunteer physicians) in 1909. These classes were taught in special railroad cars designed as mobile classrooms. Then in 1910, Dr. Matthew J. Shields (who had been teaching first aid to coal miners in Pennsylvania) was hired as the ARC Staff Physician. And eventually, the ARC began training lay people as first aid instructors. Although these are the earliest records of first aid classes for civilians, first aid manuals have a much longer history. For example, in 1633, a physician named Stephen Bradwell published Helps for Suddain Accidents