In reply to JayPee630:
> I think the critical question here are what is this for?
Well, 'Context is injuries and illness in remote areas where assistance may take hours or days to eventuate', to expand on that remoteness could be a national park in a first world country, or some backwater part of the world. The reason for being there may be climbing, or hiking, or kayaking. The injuries and illness would be things that may manifest on such trips such as broken bones or infection. As to the people in care, those would be friends or family, or even just whatever messed up person we happen to stumble across. The primary option will be to conduct first aid and call in emergency services. However, for whatever reasons emergency services may take too long - if they're coming at all.
> You mention the CV, but the CV for what? And you have no existing qualification now?
No existing relevant qualifications, aye. As for the CV, well, I work in ICT. A completely unrelated field, though the people who view my CV are often impressed by completely unrelated things, such as seeing a need for some skill and going out of my way to acquire it - or things that are just different but in a good way. (Case in point, I originally got the job with a traditional engineering degree).
> The honest answer is that there's a massive gap between basic first aid skills (FAAW/mountain first aid - all the 2-3 days courses) and then a higher professional level of qualification such as ambulance technician (sometimes called EMT in the UK), paramedic, and the niche MR casualty care courses - with not much that's useful to fill it.
Indeed!
> The key problem is that you can learn skills (and for sure there are plenty of companies that will take your cash to teach you them) such as cannulation, giving IV fluids, drug and oxygen therapy, advanced airway management, etc. etc.) but without detailed training and on-going experience you'll never have the competence and clinical knowledge to know when to use them.
Refresher training every few years is feasible, though as you imply I would be after a course that was reasonably complete in itself, rather than have the implicit assumption that it was just one step in a longer education.
> Exmed are brilliant, as are a few other training providers - including all the ones mentioned. For $8,000 you could definitely get some good training, but without thinking about it first it might well be a waste of cash.
I suppose the crux of my problem is I consider normal first aid to be barely scratching the surface. You can't learn much in three days, and given the stakes it seems woefully short. On the other hand, I don't want to spend 10 years and end up working in A&E. I consider weeks of my life a reasonable amount of time to dedicate to this task, as it isn't my field and emergency services will hopefully be promptly available.
I'm also one of those people who quite enjoys learning (it would be a holiday of sorts from my current job!).
I have made the implicit assumption that there is some worthwhile increase in patient outcomes via expanding on training from the 2-3 day first aid courses to something more intensive spanning weeks. This may not be true.