First Aid Training

There's snow up in the mountains of North Wales! The question is, how long will it last?....  

As part of my qualifications for guiding and instructing in the mountains, I'm required to do a two-day first aid course every three years to keep me up to date with the current best practice. I think the first one I attended was with Andy Brown in 1995 and run by the British Association of Ski Patrollers, so I've been to a few over the years. This one was made different by the fact we all had to be socially distanced - it's hard to put someone in the recovery position while maintaining a 2m distance! The course was held in the huge hall of the Conway Outdoor Centre (next to Plas Newydd) and to keep the air fresh we had the doors open - it was freezing, (the centre has also been unused since March, so it was never going to be a warm room!) so I was glad of the chance to keep warm where I could, such as bandaging...

As we couldn't bandage each other, we had to improvise!

CPR training did at least generate some warmth.

It was a good course and with a good team of experienced instructors from the centre, which meant that we could go into more specific details about working with groups, which made it especially relevant. Hopefully, I won't ever have to need much of what I learnt....