Patient Assessment

Look, listen, and feel. 

If you’ve been around wilderness medicine long enough, you may remember when this was the standard teaching for determining breathing status. You place your hand on the injured party’s stomach (feel), your ear to their mouth (listen), and watch (look) to see whether their chest is rising and falling.  

This method remains a foundation for assessing breathing, and its application has been expanded to cover a wider range of injuries and illnesses common in wilderness scenarios.

Look, Listen, and Feel

Look, listen, and feel is still a great way to remember that much of the assessment process (arguably the most important) comes in the form of look (visually inspect), listen (auscultate), and feel (palpate). These three actions are like the bumps on a key that align with tumblers to open a lock. In the context of emergency medicine, they form the key that unlocks the door to assessing the patient’s condition and developing treatment and evacuation plans.

NCOAE’s Patient Assessment Process

“Assessment” is the process of determining the nature, quality, or ability of something. In the context of medical assessment, it refers to determining the realities of the patient’s condition and environment factors in order to provide appropriate care and make well-informed evacuation decisions. 

In order to most accurately determine these realities, it is important to use a system of assessment that is easy to remember yet sophisticated enough to avoid overlooking vital data.

While assessment varies depending on the patient’s condition, environmental factors, and the wilderness medicine provider’s level of training and experience, The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) patient assessment process is a wonderful example of a (more…)