Essential Medical Care Course - Weyer Tactical

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DaveT
Posts: 196
Joined: Fri Mar 24, 2006 7:35 pm
Location: NE Ohio

Essential Medical Care Course - Weyer Tactical

Post by DaveT »

Just got an email today that Weyer Tactical has scheduled some of its courses for this spring. One that jumped out at me is the "Essential Medical Care Course."

The class outline sounds good:

Topics covered:
Basic first aid
Assessment
Wound identification
Hemorrhage control
Looking past the wound (Possible underlying conditions)
Fractures, sprains, strains
Care under fire
Airway management
Trauma Assessment
Signs/Symptoms of shock
Treatment for shock
Sucking chest wounds
Improvised tourniquets
Improvised splints
Improvised Israeli bandages
Medical equipment recommendations

--so basically this would be good for dealing with a gunshot wound incident, but it seems like most of what's here could be really good to know if you came up on a car accident scene, etc. - practical care that goes beyond a basic first aid class, and will give you enough knowledge to help people until the ambulance arrives or you get them to the ER.

The email I got said this class will be Tuesday, May 9, from 6-10 p.m. and cost $50. That price seems pretty reasonable to me - in the ballpark of what the Red Cross first aid costs, but covers more serious injuries.

http://www.weyertactical.com/medical-courses-emcc.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Other classes included an AR-15 Armorer/Maintenance course on May 5, and Performance Shotgun in August.

I haven't taken any courses from them yet, but I'm going to try to make it to the EMCC class. I have taken a class with one of their instructors years ago and thought he was good, so I'm extrapolating that he would probably associate with a good group - take that for what it's worth. I have no other affiliation with them, but I think their class offerings look good.
DaveT
Posts: 196
Joined: Fri Mar 24, 2006 7:35 pm
Location: NE Ohio

Re: Essential Medical Care Course - Weyer Tactical - REVIEW

Post by DaveT »

I attended the Essential Medical Care Course at Weyer Tactical in Alliance on Thursday night. This review has become really long, so for the short version: My overall impressions – this is a very worthwhile course, quite reasonably priced, taught well. I look forward to attending other courses at Weyer Tactical in the future.

There were 9 students in the class. My only previous medical training was Red Cross Basic First Aid and CPR, about 5 or so years ago. This seemed to be about the average for the group. The big thing I remember from basic first aid was “Call 911 first, then provide care.” The care pretty much topped out at “apply gauze and use direct pressure.”

The class was taught by Shaun Baskerville, whose background includes service as a Marine, and he is currently working in law enforcement, including as a member of a Special Response Team and Tactical Emergency Medical Support. While Shaun led the class, he got input from Joe Weyer (pronounced “wire”), the owner and instructor of Weyer Tactical, whose background includes service in the Army and with a Special Operations unit. Bill Clark, an Army Ranger and current National Guard member, is also an instructor and he offered his insights.

The outline of the course was listed in my first post on this thread. It won't make you an instant EMT, or give you a title, but it's four hours of training that shows that with a little knowledge and some fairly simple tools, it's possible to keep seriously injured people alive until the ambulance arrives.

Shaun said we would be using the “crawl, walk, run” method of instruction as we tackled this topic. He started off with some images of the Boston bombing. It's definitely a timely reminder of the whole range of things that might make a class like this invaluable – everything from a terror attack to a shooting range accident to a car wreck to a nasty fall around the house. And it was reinforced to the students in the room (mostly CHL holders) that most of us statistically stand a much higher likelihood of someday needing to know how to help someone medically than using a CHL to defend ourselves.

Some of the photos were extremely graphic – profuse bleeding, clothing blown off people, smoke/burns on their flesh, amputations. But they weren't used gratuitously – they were shown in part to give an idea of wounds you might see – and to show that even though these things can look horrendous, these people can be helped and can survive with prompt, competently applied aid. One of the good things was to look at at the injuries, get over the “ick” factor, and start thinking about “if I ran into a situation where someone was hurt like that, what could I do to help?” You could say it is a baby steps form of stress inoculation – get you to face something uncomfortable and still apply what you've learned in a stressful situation. That was one of the big mindset hurdles that this class helped me overcome.

We got an introduction to how to assess an injury, and how to pick which tool (or tools) would be needed. Using photos, videos and verbal description, Shaun laid out a rough guide of how to make the selection, and then we learned how to apply them.

The triad of simple tools to help in case of serious injury? A tourniquet, gauze, and a compression bandage. Ideally, gauze impregnated with a hemostatic agent like QuikClot or Celox. But apparently, the advantage with the hemcon agents is in the 5% range or so – so it's an advantage, but not an overwhelming one, and good results can be had with some variant of plain gauze.

First off, he showed us an array of top commercial tourniquets, starting with the North American Rescue Combat Application Tourniquet, or “CAT” for short; the SOF-Tactical Tourniquet or “SOF-T” These two are pretty similar – a buckled loop of nylon webbing that you put over a limb and tighten similar to how you'd tighten a belt, then a “windlass” [a sturdy length of metallic bar] is cranked in a circle until it tightens enough to restrict circulation and stop the bleeding in the extremity. Bill stepped in to show the Tourni-Kwik TK4 – basically a length of elastic about 2 inches wide and roughly 18 inches long, with padded metal hooks on either end. With this, you drape it over the limb you're working on, hook one end over elastic, then pull in the opposite direction and continue to wrap tightly until the bleeding has stopped, then secure the second hook to the edge of the elastic.

We got time to rotate through and try all three of these commercial tourniquets, plus an ingenious improvised tourniquet that Shaun introduced us to.

He broke bleeding down into two different types – a veinous bleed, which shows dark blood, and accounts for the majority of cuts you usually see, from papercut up to some pretty serious injuries. Arterial bleeding is notably different for the bright red oxygenated blood, and it's usually squirting out of the body to the rhythm of the heartbeat. In the case of a severe arterial bleed, Shaun said an untreated victim will have about a minute of conscioiusness, and three to five minutes left to live.

So, what did I learn here? If you see an arterial bleed, you don't want to have to try to improvise a tourniquet – you want a purpose-built tourniquet, and one that's ready to apply RIGHT NOW.
I also learned I don't want the first time I ever try to put a tourniquet on someone – or myself – to be when I NEED to do it. Although the mechanisms on all of them are pretty simple, I found myself fumbling around a bit. When I tried putting one on myself, I sometimes snugged the belt tight, only to find that it put the windlass in a place I couldn't reach to perform the final tightening of the tourniquet. I'd seen pictures of all three of these models online prior to the class, but it was invaluable to be able to try them all out, get a feel for them, and try applying them to other people and to myself.

Finally, on tourniquets: Once you put one on, YOU DO NOT REMOVE IT. In a hospital setting, the ER or trauma specialists are going to be the people to deal with it. Tourniquets can remain on safely for hours and hours – we (those of us who aren't medical personnel) might run into a situation in our lives where we need to put one on someone, but we're never going to be the ones to take them off.

The next simple tool was rolled gauze – either with a hemosatic agent like Quikclot or Celox – or just plain Kerlix. We saw video of it being used to stop arterial bleeding. Seeing it online was different than practicing the maneuver. I had envisioned packing a wound to be inserting gauze into a wound to absorb blood in place. But as Shaun and Joe explained, the pressure of the blood will dislodge the gauze unless it's packed in so tightly that it's not absorbing the blood – it's a physical barrier, like a cork in a bottle. We practiced packing gauze into our own hands, then into the cupped hands of a partner (simulating a large wound, like the exit wound of a gunshot). That was helpful, but the lightbulb moment came for me on this exercise when Joe circulated among those of us trying it out, and he packed the gauze into my cupped hands. Feeling it done right made it all clear.

Around this time, Joe took a moment to bring home to the class how hard intervention can be. He said he's been on the scene to treat several people with severe bleeding, including gunshots. And he said that effective treatment will usually be more painful than the initial injury, including gunshots. The injured person may tell you to stop it – grimace, scream, try to punch you. But if it's truly a life-threatening injury, you can't stop thet treatment because it's painful. These reactions are normal, even – and perhaps especially – if you're doing it right.

Shaun then introduced the final critical tool – a compression bandage. We tried the Israeli bandage and similar setups. Basically, they're a thick absorbent pad attached to a wide elastic band. They somewhat bridge the gap between direct pressure and a tourniquet – they cover and protect a wound, and as it tightens it can help decrease blood loss. And once it's set, you can still use direct pressure on top of the compression bandage.

So, as the lecture wound down, they had one last surprise for us. Joe had us all turn toward one wall as the surprise passed through the room to get in place behind room dividers. Shaun then explained that we were going to put our practice with the tools to the test. They had volunteers who were set up in three separate injury scenario stations. Shaun, Joe and Bill each took over one of the scenarios. They told us what to expect – when we entered the individual rooms, we were to treat what we saw as real. We were to observe the victim, assess the type and severity of their injury, and using the tools we'd been practicing with, we needed to provide a life-saving intervention. The instructors would watch us, but they weren't there to answer questions. If we got sidetracked or caught up in a non-productive course of action, they'd give some suggestions, but they weren't there tell us what to do.

Without giving away any specifics, the volunteers were set up with realistic Halloween makeup-style injuries – up to and including spurting arterial bleeding. For me, it was a little hard to get into the full spirit of roleplaying, but this was a major learning experience. First off – I found it a lot harder to decide what was the most critical first step for the injury I saw, and pretty frequently skipped steps or totally overlooked the obvious first thing that needed done.

With some well-timed suggestions, I was able to recover from my poor beginnings, but for the two most serious injuries, I was not doing too hot on my own.

Some nice attention to detail really added to the tension of the simulation – simple things, like someone with arterial bleeding spurting out, looking me in the eye and weakly saying “Help me.” An injured young lady, half-lying in a pool of her own blood, whimpering in pain, then crying out as I tried to secure her wound. In fact, after one student finished his first simulation, I could see he was a bit rattled – a little nervous laughter, he was a little bit pale, and he seemed to be really distracted by the need to get the fake blood off his hands. It was after I finished my second scenario that I found myself really sidetracked by the need to get that blood off of me. All of these things really ramped up the stress level. And this was a real layer of stress inoculation – I was less rattled by each new simulation. And that was one of the most unique things about the course – the ability to test what we'd been practicing, in some elaborately realistic situations, make decisions and take action under pressure, and have the safety net of not having mistakes hurt anyone. I did some things right, but as Shaun stressed before we did the simulations, I learned more from my mistakes than from what I did right.

There was a lot more information tha was touched on or covered more lightly than what I've mentioned – from CAB – Circulation, Airway, Breathing, to the signs and treatments for shock; safety precautions like eye protection, gloves and masks – lots to take in in one night.

The instructors circulated through the room during the hands-on portions to answer questions or correct students – Bill even played injured when I needed a partner to practice applying tourniquets.
As far as room for improvement in the class – we didn't get to cover or practice everything on the syllabus. We never really got into the use of splints, and how to deal with a sucking chest wound was touched on so lightly that I'm not really sure I could be of much use with that injury.

Shaun battled a little uncooperative technology at the beginning of the class – he's a PC guy and he was using a borrowed Mac laptop, so the early portion of the slideshow and Powerpoints went slower than the rest of the presentation.

I got a lot out of this class. If you've got interest in learning more than Red Cross Basic First Aid has to offer, but aren't ready to take the giant leap to becoming an EMT, this class has potentially life-saving skills you can get in one evening.

I was impressed with all the instructors, and I'm hoping to return for some of the other courses they offer before too long. Looking at their course calendar, they have the pistol, home shotgun and carbine courses you might expect, but also have some free classes like beer brewing (next week) and a wine seminar – they're really offering an eclectic mix of classes.

Dave
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Re: Essential Medical Care Course - Weyer Tactical

Post by TSiWRX »

Awesome AAR. Thank you.

I need a class like this.
Allen - Shaker Heights, Ohio
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Re: Essential Medical Care Course - Weyer Tactical

Post by ArmyMedic90 »

Just be careful with that kind of stuff. Learning it to use on a buddy? Sure. But using medical skills and tactics on strangers opens you up to law suits.

As a medic in the Army I learned and acquired skills that are well beyond my certified skills as an EMT. If I ever started a line on a civilian, pushed drugs into a civilian, used Combat Gauze on a civilian, etc., I'd probably lose my entire life savings in civil court...
U.S. Army Combat Medic
Sworn LEO
Nationally Registered EMT
NRA Certified RSO
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Re: Essential Medical Care Course - Weyer Tactical

Post by TSiWRX »

Sadly, this is the world we live in. :(
Allen - Shaker Heights, Ohio
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