Okay, I started this in Dweste's Urban FAK thread, but rather than continue the hijack, I'm starting a new one.

My initial post:


Comms reply:


MDinana's post:


Anyone else? (And if I'm doing this wrong, let me know.)

Good thread.

I was taught some triage as part of an industrial first aid course for working in refineries. They called it multiple casualty scene response or something like that.


In USA triage is also taught through FEMA to Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT) and you can find more information here.
http://www.citizencorps.gov/cert/about.shtm
They include contact information and training material.

The Triage teaching unit is in the instructors manual under emergency medical (part 1).

For somebody living in USA CERT would be a good way of getting a pretty good bit of training really cheaply.

Just as an after-note:
There are a lot of different forms of triage and they almost all have different priorities.
One of them might base the priorities on who is likely to survive, ie severity of injury.
Another triage system might base priority on how important it is to transport them to treatment instead of treating them right where they are.
A third might be based on what you can effectively treat with what you have right there, and who is more likely to die before help arrives without any treatment.

Triage as applied in a hospital ER and triage as applied by EMT are horses of different colours. They have different priorities and different resources.

START is likely the first triage training program to be directed at civilian EMT and First Responders. It was developed for responders to earthquakes in California.

The one thing about field triage is that it is an assessment system. You need to assess how serious all of the injuries are.
You can't stop and freeze on any one survivor because the next one might be even more critical.

Yeah, I think CERT is good program, and first learned of it in this forum. Unfortunately in my city and this is probably endemic due to the economy, it got dropped as a service as the city tightened its belt.

There's an active CERT program here in San Diego. I'm looking into it.

I thought CERT was just some acronym I didn't know... didn't realize it was an actual coarse

"Community Emergency Response Team"

About CERT

This looks interesting, for many reasons.

Although we do have CERT in my area, my particular city runs a CEPA program--Community Emergency Preparedness Academy. The actual curriculum is very similar between the two, but there is no official team to join as with CERT. You're just trained to be ready to help yourself and your neighbors.

quote=Todd W]
Although we do have CERT in my area, my particular city runs a CEPA program--Community Emergency Preparedness Academy. The actual curriculum is very similar between the two, but there is no official team to join as with CERT. You're just trained to be ready to help yourself and your neighbors. [/quote]

I live in a city that does CEPA - it has the advantage of not requiring much leadership to maintain, just open classes on a schedule; and keeping the trained CERTS out of the way of the local first responders, who sometimes find them to be a pain in the ass. I've seen self-responders show up at fires and local disasters and self-deploy, and I agree some of them can be a pain, but if you have a trained CERT team 1. they know not to try to self-respond, or they'll quickly get dropped and 2. they can be available for more stuff, whether its staffing a first aid station at a community event or directing traffic. Plus as you reach a critical mass of trained CERTS, some interesting possibilities emerge where you can actually integrate them into the community response plan. Also the lack of organization and leadership has a couple pitfalls: I took the CEPA introduction course from my city, and asked how we could connect with others in the area who have taken CEPA. The answer was we can't, they don't provide a list of other CEPA trainees, so you won't actually know who has trained in your neighborhood until an event occurs. Also, lacking organization means you lack follow up training oppportunities, the chance to practice what you learn in class and internalize it better. And last, if I hadn't joined a CERT team in an nearby city instead of my own, I wouldn't have found an even better opportunity with the Red Cross, basically putting CERTish skills to use on a much more regular basis.

You can get training from other resources. My city has it's CERT training manual online at
http://www.sanmateocert.org/disaster/pdf/cert_handbook.pdf
which triggers the download of a 2.1MB file. It has a chapter on triage and a great deal of information on first aid and preparedness. But there's nothing like hands on training. See if any of these links provide a course near you:
http://www.cieux.com/adventureKits.html#train