Search and Rescue

According to some emergency medical professionals, including one of my early mentors, every emergency medical service (EMS) call involves a search. Even in urban settings where we’re given a home address for a patient, we need to confirm the location, find it, and gain access to the patient. And even after arriving at the right address, finding and gaining access to the patient within the home or building can be a challenge.

As a current or future Wilderness Medicine Care Provider, you may be called upon to provide care in diverse environments under a variety of circumstances — and you need to be prepared to do so. One of the environments we train for here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) is the backcountry, more commonly referred to as the wilderness.

Wilderness medicine encompasses a broad range of scenarios, ranging from the simple treatment of basic cuts, scrapes, blisters, and bruises, to conducting complex search and rescue operations in remote areas, in dangerous weather conditions and across challenging terrain. 

Patients are often those within an activity group or in a group nearby, but sometimes the incoming call notifies us of a problem in a remote, unclear location. In such cases, we need to find the patient before we can treat the patient, and in many cases, we need to move distressed individuals or parties to safety. 

In this post, I bring you up to speed on the fundamentals of conducting search and rescue in diverse environments and unpredictable circumstances.

Defining Search and Rescue (SAR)

Wilderness medicine includes some complex and challenging diagnostic and treatment procedures. SAR adds another layer of complexity to make it even more challenging. To gain a better understanding of the challenges, consider what each of these tasks involves: (more…)