This was the first training course for this year as well as with a new sea school. The participants all arrived ready and willing for the RYA First Aid at Sea course. The venue and the time was set and 10 club members met at the Hamble School of Yachting headquarters based at Mercury Marina on the river Hamble.
Once we had all had a cup of something hot, and turned the heating up in the room as it was an unseasonably cold spring morning, we were introduced to Tim Allen who was to be our instructor for the day. Tim is a freelance trainer (www.watercraft.org.uk) that HSY bring in for this course as he has a wealth of experience in this area.
We started by covering the basics of finding a casualty and assessing the situation as well as how to deal with someone who is unconscious but breathing. This included an opportunity to put, and be put, into the recovery position. This involved some interesting techniques for small people moving larger ones, as well as for dealing with the confined space of a yacht.
After lunch we moved on to dealing with a casualty who isn’t breathing. Many of us haven’t done this course for a number of years and the guidance on CPR has changed, so for that information alone the day was time well spent.
We all then had a chance to administer two minutes of CPR to ‘Anne’, which gave an idea of how tiring it would be to do this for real!
From there we moved on to cover other areas of first aid, such as dressing wounds and traumatic head injuries and their symptoms. We finished the day with discussions about seasickness and related coping strategies, including the impact on other medical conditions that are dealt with by drugs if someone is being sick.
All in all a very good and informative day, thank you to those who attended and those that organised the day.
29th April 2018