My main take away from CPR/first aid courses is;
Well done!
Yes, those stats about the success of CPR and AEDs still depend on an early arrival at hospital!
I am required to keep my RYA First Aid at Sea 'current'. I look at the manual with dread, clearly it is a bog standard First Aid manual with a RYA cover on it. Fine if you are in the middle of a city or town with an ambulance station. Saying that the last government did their best to close them all down as an 'efficiency saving'.
I have heard that before, but... there is always a but.
And hypothermia is of particular interest to boaters as that is what gets you if you fall in the sea, especially without a life jacket as once you are hypothermic you can’t swim and if you can’t swim you drown.
I totally agree. As you can get it on a mountain or even out in a city on a cool night poorly dressed or in a freezer the size of a large supermarket.
i dread ever falling in, i get cold shock all too easily.
The numbers seem more optimistic than I recall but the message is definitely the same.
But, they have expensive consumable parts - batteries like EPIRBs and pads that only last about three years (perhaps less for the cheapest ones?). Pretty much every sailing club should give serious thought to having one - but it’s much less obvious that it makes sense on a typical yacht.
What content do you think is missing from the book or the course which is realistic to cover in the sort of time window typical people would volunteer for?
Even in a hospital car park the chances of saving your life if you have a major MI are far from great.
That does seem a bit of an oversight. My most recent FA course was an “outdoor” one based on land - quite a bit of time on it was spent discussing when best to call ambulance and when to call mountain rescue (police), or organise your own resources. Hopefully the RYA course would highlight the availability of medical advice via CG. For club instructors the decision of 999 for Amb v vhf (or 999) for cg would not always be clear cut / obvious.
The practice ones took 3 AA batteries. I rather assumed they were standard with wires disconnected. Even had a cover to get at some bit for software update.
The first think I would do is to change the language so that it is more relevant to life at sea.
See my comment about MRT membership.
I am well aware of the fact.
An interesting conversation and well done for the instructor for raising the topic. I've always been told that you call any of the services and they sort out what 'assets' they need to do the task.
I'll need to check the book, but don't recall any comments on medical advice from the CG, but Reeds does.
somebody saying 'yes, but... '
I shocked myself at my last 'refresher' that I had held a first aid certificate for 50 years!
Well not for my type of sailing, but see my comment in post #133 about the RYA forgetting its roots.
I think those sort of questions might be difficult to cover for all sorts of patients. Are you outside of radio / phone range where CG medical advice line would be able to provide specific advice for the situation you find yourself in (the particular patient, injuries, evacuation options). First aid, especially first aid on a 1 day course, is about doing enough to keep the casualty alive to make that advice call, or dealing with fairly minor injuries where it’s not needed. It’s difficult to criticise the RYA for having a course that covers what the vast majority of its members need rather than making a dinghy instructor sit through an extra day of irrelevant stuff. Other training is available to people who need it - and I believe the RYA will recognise most of it.
But different countries have different approaches, even different size lifeboats will be different. The last think the winchman or cox needs is someone arguing that this is not what they were taught or expected. But there is an underlying issue there which ALL (not just RYA courses have) which is the instructor may never have even put a sticking plaster on a real casualty!
Ultimately they will - but they may not be the quickest to understand their own limitations. He was an MRT medic he had been to calls where people have called the ambulance, who have deployed various levels of resource before ultimately saying we need the MRT - and then waiting whilst they were mustered, travel to scene etc. Equally he's been to shouts where the casualty has been lying on cold wet ground far longer than needed if the called / ambulance service has just understood that there was a very short carry / lots of bystanders / reasonable road access close by. He suggested its probably got worse with large computer managed asset deployment systems - the crew that turn up may never have been in the area before, the control room staff are looking at a map on a screen and have no local knowledge. What surprised me most was that of the dozen or so people on the course, about 1/2 had never dialed 999 - including people who were renewing their qual rather than first time first aiders. Several were unaware / forgot that the correct way to call the MRT is to first call the police then ask for mountain rescue (i guess if you ask on an RYA course you might be surprised how many say call an ambulance for a scenario on board a yacht). Those who had not done a course recently have been walking past defibrillators for years without considering how you access them (some you can just grab, some are in alarmed cases, some need an unlock code from the ambulance operator). On a one day course you really are dealing with that level of background, if you make the course longer it will put off a lot of people from coming which is likely counter productive.
But from your avatar I'm guessing that "your 30's" were some time ago, and some of the latest thinking on longer term emergency care may have moved on since then? I suspect that you are actually not that different from many - you'd like to know a bit more but in cash and time terms you are reluctant to spend more.
The RYA first aid course has been largely unchanged for ~30 years (obviously things have been modified in line with resuscitation council guidelines etc - but the depth / content of the course is pretty much the same). I think you are looking at this through a bias of "RYA is wrong" and then finding things to fault. How many offshore sailors have found themselves in a medical emergency and then come back ashore and said "if only the RYA had taught me better"?
When did you last bareboat charter? I looked about 8 yrs ago and there were a few places on the med doing flotilla charters for people with no quals but very much not the norm; about 3 years ago I looked again and everywhere wanted paperwork. Perhaps there are places that will still charter with no questions or with a "sailing CV" but I really think you'd find it much harder than your post suggests. Certainly my point still stands - would YOU hand over your boat to a stranger who have no proof they had a clue?
To even become a dinghy instructor you need to pass a sailing assessment, it can't be that you have "no knowledge whatsoever".
I think trustworthy is the wrong adjective. Its quite an emotional adjective.
Someone decided you have enough ability to be a dinghy instructor. Not everyone passes that course so either you are understating your capability or suggesting that whoever ran your course overlooked your lack of competence?
Assuming your course wasn't endorsed to say it was for displacement craft only it should/would have included some higher speed manouveres. The bit of paper doesn't necessarily mean someone would give you the keys to a 300HP machine... but if you haven't even taken those 2 days to do the "noddy course" should anyone hand your the keys to anything? Because that says to me "not interested in learning to do it safely".
I am struggling to imagine anyone who "should not have a qualification in first aid". Which part of that course were you unable to complete? Or did you somehow think that a 1 day first aid course was "qualifying" you as a paramedic or brain surgeon? I personally think its a reasonable expectation of anyone trusted to teach others to sail dinghies that they have a rudimentary knowledge of first aid. In fact I can't understand anyone who "needed" to teach dinghies not "wanting" to have that training to deal with the basics of a crisis if the preverbial hit the fan (or the prop!).
People do fail them. RYA instructors often have nice ways to manage that (eg. if you fail DS but don't already have CC you might leave that week with a bit of paper anyway; I know someone who was made to come back and do a 3rd day of those manouveres that your 8yr old could manage, and I know someone who sat the dinghy instructor preassessment 3 times (in 2 different centres) before being allowed to progress)
Well as it always should. But the effort required to do that is a lot smaller when someone has paperwork too.
Nobody has forced you to do any of that! That suggests to me that whilst you've plenty to rant about, actually somewhere there was "value" in it - even if that value was just keeping an insurer happy, enabling some local authority funding or some other hassle factor.
In seven pages you are first to "come clean" so to speak sir, and there I was feeling decidedly the party of one. But its funny isnt it. Even back in the 1950's you had to have a car license, vehicle license, and of course a commercial shipping ticket and most definitely a log of progressive training that says you can fly a plane... but small leisure boating?
Forgive me for not being clear, but the clue is in the name Royal Yachting Association. My comment was that the RYA is morphing into an 'everything on the water association', everything from canal narrowboats to the Olympics via SUPs. I see this a dilution of their expertise and experience.
So do I, but an organisation that concentrates on yachting. It has been some time since I last work a kapok lifejacket; 1976 to be exact. To this day I suspect they were WWII issue from HMS St Christopher.
Not quite, it should be aimed at the leisure sailor, but be quite clear that the local ambulance trust is not going to draw alongside your vessel in their normal response times.
