Tuesday 27 May 2014

This is my very first blog.
I have chosen to write about Tree Surgeons or Arborists and Utility Arb. Tree Surgeon and Arborist are largely the same person, except maybe the arborist has done a bit more theoretical training. Utility Arb is the arm of tree surgery that deals with the Utlities, such as electricity cables and so forth.

As far as I can ascertain the practitioner is only required to hold an Emergency First Aid at Work Certificate, although, some have the three day First Aid at Work qualification. Three days training would seem eminently more sensible for people who are working in quite a high risk industry, which is quite unique - the point of me writing!
It would seem that enormous numbers of tree surgeon/arborists attend standard first aid courses that do not, and perhaps cannot cater for such a specialist industry. The people who I have spoken to about this complain that the training they receive is not relevant to their industry! It is their most serious complaint. The other complaints often levied, are poor quality training, or just plain boring, and out of date techniques.

I am a professional first aid trainer, I have BSc honours in PreHospital Care, plus a bunch of other stuff, First Responder for WMAS etc. I believe that anyone who comes on one of my courses must get training that is pertinent to their working environment. To this end I have detailed the subject matter that I think should be covered on an arborists first aid course.

The obvious things are head injuries, bleeding, allergies/asthma/fitting and so forth, a bit of CPR. I say a bit because resuscitation secondary to trauma is one of the greater challenges of the medical world! I think its essential to include life threatening haemorrhage, and the CABC protocol. the use of pressure bandages, packing and finally tourniquets. A brief understanding of suspension trauma is a good idea too! Disaster management together with situational awareness and CRM training would be life critical. As will electric shock treatment.
Other subjects will be "thorn strike" and general splinter removal, eye irrigation, bit on burns etc.

If anyone ever reads this, please add subjects to be covered, correct anything I have got wrong, its my very first blog!

Martin

2 comments:

  1. Can you go further and include silviculture (and maybe even horticulture?) into this discussion.

    Any 'industry specific' first aid for tree and forestry professionals would be most welcome. I have attended many frankly useless first aid 'top-up' courses for insurance in France and Scotland - useless as the principal injuries are not considered and the geography of our working sites mean that much equipment or additional assistance is simply unavailable. It does seem that 'survival' training is more relevant - which is a scary position to be in.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you for your comments, I will incorporate them into my courses when I run them. :-)

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