Presented by Dr. Alec Ritchie, North Shore SAR team member and medical director.
As one of Canada’s busiest SAR teams, North Shore SAR reviewed occupational accidents of the all-volunteer SAR team. They found that 59% were sustained during training, 96% were traumatic injuries although most minor. There were 24 fatalities in the line of duty from 1969 to 2020. This included 3 during training and 6 other fatalities in two separate helicopter crashes. There were several joint sessions between MEDCOM and other commissions including amazing case reports from Poland and important new work from Responder Alliance’s Laura McGladrey on pre-incident planning and major incident response. Dr. Sheets led a development session on a psychosocial and psychological first aid recommendation paper that’s in progress. Responder Alliance (RA) is an organizational partner with the MRA. Operational stress from SAR work continues to get a lot of attention and recommendations are being developed currently. If this topic interests you, look at the RA website for tools, links, and educational
opportunities. Resilience and good mental health help you and your team provide more compassionate patient care, promote team member retention, and prevent stress injury in major incidents. Other development sessions which are in progress include guidelines for Termination of Resuscitation and the updates to the Diploma in Mountain Medicine course requirements, which is co-sponsored by ICAR, ISMM and UIAA.
