[Tony G]

Time to update your Outdoors First Aid skills

This year the club has organised an Outdoors First Aid Course which is listed on the winter schedule. Part of the reason outdoor enthusiasts choose to tramp/mountaineer/climb with a club rather than just heading off with their friends is because clubs can provide superior safety systems and promote a safe approach to activities. One of the ways the club can do this is by providing training opportunities for leaders, aspiring leaders and members. We’d like to encourage as many of you as possible to attend our Outdoors First Aid Course.

The course will be run by St John’s and is being specially designed for us. It will cover all the content of their ‘First Aid Level1 and 2’ course, plus it will include a number of outdoor scenarios for participants to work through. We’ve picked a venue with tracks and bush round about so that the scenarios can be played out in realistic surroundings – outdoor first aid incidents don’t occur in a cosy warm classroom, so neither will our course! If you have any ideas for particular first aid scenarios you’d like the course to cover, please let us know.

The course will run over two days on the 6th and 7th June. It will be at Camp Wainui, a 30 min drive from Wellington, so I plan to put on a bus for transport to and from the venue each day. Participants won’t be staying at Camp Wainui overnight, so your Saturday night out on Courtney Place is not compromised (!?).

The cost of the course to participants is yet to be completely finalised. The cost of running the course is around $200 per participant, but we plan to provide a training subsidy for each participant (hopefully we’ll decide this at the next committee meeting), so the cost you pay should be less than $200. There can be up to 20 participants (I’m going, so there are 19 spaces left!).

So – sign up quick, and hopefully we can make this a regular feature of the winter schedule! We particularly encourage members who will be volunteering on the club’s blue duck trap line in the Ruahines to sign up. And, while we particularly encourage trip leaders to attend, we also encourage other club members to up skill.

The course covers three NZQA units, and covers all the content required for workplace first aid providers, so it may also cover your employers first aid training requirements.

Thanks to club member Carole Lillico at St John’s for helping to arrange the course.

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