Wilderness Medicine....

is where I started.

I began my journey in Emergency Medicine by taking a Wilderness First Responder Course taught by by Stonehearth Open Learning Opportunities.

My definition of Wilderness Medicine is:

The assessment and treatment of patients in situations where transportation to definitive care is not readily accessible

Just consider any instance where "the golden hour" is definitely not going to be an option.

It has definitely affected my attitudes and beliefs towards patient care.

It has helped me understand that Emergency Medicine is all about looking for trends and treating problems before they become problems. Emergency Medicine is about understand what's really important (AIRWAY! AIRWAY! AIRWAY!!) and understanding how seemingly secondary injury may exacerbate what we really should be paying attention to.

In the urban world, sometimes when talking to colleagues I refer to "hot potato-ing" a patient. Typically this is in jest, but I am a firm believer that in most instances there is nothing I can really do to make a patient better, and my job as a basic rescuer involves trying to keep the patient from getting worst before I can "hot potato" them to the next level of definitive care.

This attitude really doesn't work so well for Paramedics.

If a patient goes into cardiac arrest, there really isn't anything a hospital can do for them that a paramedic can't (as far as I know). And I think that this is where much of the difficulty of that mindset swap may throw some wannabe-student-paramedics off, because if they spent their entire previous work history constantly hot potato-ing patients off, then actually dealing with a stressful situation may be difficult, if not impossible.

Wilderness Medicine is the exact opposite.

From minute one, you are taught that this situation is going to be long, and no way is this patient going to be going anywhere soon.



So we will see how things go I guess.