9/29 Wilderness Medicine Wednesday

Today's Wilderness Medicine post is about different types of patient carries. Spolier alert: this overhead lift is not one of them. Read the post to find out!

by Coach Nick

​Hello everyone! I hope you guys have been getting outside and enjoying the transition into fall weather and the lack of smoke around town! Today’s Wilderness Medicine Wednesday post is going to be about moving patients that are injured. Rather than try to write a bunch of descriptions I will show you some videos that hopefully make a little more sense. I want to go over three useful types of patient moves and show you some examples via video. Some of these moves may sound a little unorthodox but we need to remember that we are approaching this from the perspective of being in the wilderness.

​The first type of move is going to be the emergency move. There’s no video for this one because it’s extremely simple. We are going to grab the patient and get them out of harm’s way as quickly as possible. We would use this in a scenario where the patient’s life is in immediate danger like they were lying in the path of an avalanche, drowning in a river, or had just been attacked by a bear. We want to execute this move when there’s no doubt that their life is in danger. This may feel a little unorthodox especially when we have a concern about the patient’s spine. As you may know when someone suffers a spinal injury (or we suspect they have, I’ll talk about this next week) they need to be moved very carefully in order to not risk additional injury, especially paralysis. When their life is on the line such as one of the above scenarios, we are going to basically ignore this risk and get them to safety. That’s the emergency move. 

Another type of move is called the BEAM method. You need at least 5-6 people or more to pull this off but it’s very useful especially over short distances. The video below demonstrated the BEAM method. A note on this one: this is not considered a stable move for patients with spinal injuries however it can be used in some scenarios. If you want to do this and think the patient may have a spinal injury make sure to take special care in immobilizing the head and neck. The next carry I’ll show you is the only one we will consider “safe” for spinal injuries in the wilderness. One thing to note from this video is the guy in the grey shirt holding the patient’s head is in charge. This is always the case in wilderness medicine especially when carrying patients. 

​The last type of move I want to go over is the litter carry. This move is necessary when the patient can’t walk on their own and you don’t want to carry them out on your back or by some other ridiculous method. Also, this is ALWAYS the method we will use when we suspect spinal injuries. On that note, as you watch the video you may think “that doesn’t look super safe for a broken spine”. I agree, this is only to be used for spinal injuries if there’s no hope of a medical team with other equipment coming to you. If you’re waiting for search and rescue and it’s not a life or death situation don’t carry someone with a broken spine like this. Also, you may notice that the people in this video use some materials that you may not always carry. That’s okay. The important part of building litters is improvisation, this video shows you the basic structure of how one should work. I will say that if you don’t carry a tarp with you, you should. They are crucial for carrying patients, building shelters, collecting materials, and a lot of other things.
I hope you guys enjoyed this post! Have a great week everyone!

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