Never underestimate the
importance of 1st-Aid training
I have been qualified for 1st-Aid for 18-years now and I have taken the mandatory refresher courses every three years (with First Aid Central Training Services in Stockport - http://www.first-aidservices.co.uk/) to stay abreast of the constantly changing techniques and recommendations. (Things have changed a lot over those years). I have also taken part in three ‘1st-on-the-Scene’ motorcycle accident 1st-Aid courses, which I thoroughly recommend to all bikers. As the Chairman of the National Association for Bikers with a Disability (NABD) the opportunities to use my 1st-Aid knowledge have been many and varied. NABD events, by their very nature, tend to involve higher concentrations of people with disabilities and many of them have problems with mobility or chronic illness. This can often mean there is a greater likelihood of people suffering trips or falls as well as a much higher number of illness-related cases requiring 1st-Aid.
I consider myself privileged to have been able to help hundreds of people with injuries and/ or illnesses, ranging from serious burns to bee stings, serious wounds to twisted ankles and heart attacks to hypoglycaemia over the past 18-years. In addition to this, for 14 of those years, I was the designated 1st-aider on the Back Street Heroes magazine ‘Run to the Sun’ trip to the Faro Rally in Portugal, on which we took an average of 100+ bikers on a two-week 4,000+km holiday through Spain and Portugal (and France on several occasions). The range of 1st-Aid requirements on those trips involved everything from severe dehydration to hornet stings, exhaust burns to the screamingshits (lots of that), twisted joints (OK stop it…) to dental abscesses and injuries relating to motorcycle accidents (though these were blessedly few and far between). Every time I was able to help somebody on those trips, whether it was just a matter of helping Open House Issue 100 11
