This was our last class in the classroom, and it was a pretty good one. Of all the classes, I like this one best because I could re-learn or practice many of the most important things from all of hte previous classes, in preparation for our upcoming “field exercise”.
We had a few stations to rotate through, including head-to-toe assessment and bandaging/splinting. We also had a “rapid triage” station, at which we had 10-15 seconds to pick up a card, read the condition of a victim, and write down our assessment (green, yellow, red, black). It wasn’t easy! But it was a great way to review quickly, and we went throught the scenarios quickly as a class afterwards.
Additionally, we reviewed a lot of the highlights from previous classes in a big slide deck, along with some new, supporting material. Let me take this opportunity to say again that our instructors did a fantastic job making sure we had useful, interesting content to review.
Especially to prepare for our upcoming exercise, we spent some more time on reviewing building layouts and discussing how we would conduct search and rescue operations in a variety of situations.
Of course, none of this could have prepared us for the mind-bending insanity that was our Final Exercise. Not many survived that day, unfortunately….