s s A s e s a ( m c i a i a j The National Ski Patrol (NSP) used the American Red Cross Advanced First Aid (AFA) course until 1987 (phased out in 1993) to train patrollers in emergency care. Skills illustrated in the AFA textbook include 21 bandages, 16 splints and slings, 14 emergency lifts and carries as well as several automobile extrication techniques, and 2 methods for lowering a patient on a backboard from a high building or cliff. AFA students praciced backboarding not only on land but also in a wimming pool, as well as emergency childbirth with bstetric manikins. Not all of these techniques reappear in Outdoor Emerency Care (OEC), which the NSP developed in 1987– 8, under the name Winter Emergency Care. Connoiseurs of bandaging, for example, will search in vain for ome of the more artistic designs from AFA, such as the -tailed bandage for nose or jaw. But OEC still includes ar more trauma care practice than emergency medical echnician (EMT) courses, and the disparity comes out uch more conspicuously in the way the courses are aught and the skills tested than in a comparison of the extbooks and curricula. This author was an AFA instrucor and instructor trainer for 20 years, has been an OEC nstructor for the NSP since the beginning of the proram, and is currently an OEC instructor trainer. OEC courses are scenario based, which means that fter students have learned some basic skills, about 50% f OEC class time is spent on role-playing accident cenarios. Much of the other 50% is spent learning and racticing new skills. OEC students are expected to aster the textbook (which includes study guides and elf-test questions in every chapter) on their own, so as to inimize the need for lectures in class. Staging scenarios ffectively requires many knowledgeable people to act as atients and monitors. This is feasible in OEC because he NSP is a volunteer organization, with many instrucors and experienced patrollers willing to help teach the lasses. Moreover, both the midterm and final practical xaminations for OEC are a series of scenarios.