Thread: Medical Incident - Some learnings for your first aid kit.

Mine has the following, as basic field first aid to carry everywhere. My actual one is pretty big and I could deal with someone who got mangled, say a nasty fall or a gunshot wound, but it is my work one from when I was an exploration geo. I did see some nasty injuries, especially from drill rigs. I built it after I smashed my leg in a rock fall.

This stuff, if you carry nothing else. You can close wounds like steri strips (done that when wasps forced me to jump off a cliff). You can breaks and sprains and fix failed boots. Nothing will stop blisters better. I have had one strip of this over my heel when my boots failed and it lasted two weeks in Fiordland with wet boots the entire time.


I use old school battle dressings but these Israeli bandages look very good. I will have my resident Israeli look into them.

Eye bath and a bit of saline. Really very valuable. Scratched eyes is no good. Bug legs can become embedded in your eye.

Betadine. Can't beat good old fashioned iodine for pouring through everything to keep infection out. Also make a bath from it to clean a wound.

As someone mentioned, gladwrap for burns. You want to keep the oxygen out of a burn. Oxygen is for lungs. Nothing else likes it.

Steri strips (because they are better than strapping tape and weigh nothing).

On the West Coast or Nelson/Marlborough I like a prescription for an epi pen for after a major wasp incident. Possible someone will get badly stung around the neck. It happened to me, but it was mostly the back of my neck and head, plus arms. I also fell 10m during this incident and opened my arm up (landed on scree). Kicked my boot into a face and smashed the whole nest, then just jumped off the face (better than staying with the wasps). After this I started carrying an epi pen if I could get one.

Non-adhesive and adhesive non-stick wound pads.

Paracord. Not sure if anyone would allow it taught these days, but I can make a traction splint. The last person to react positively to that was the Johannesburg ambulance officer I mentioned earlier. You can at least minimum make a stretcher from it.

None of that stuff is too heavy. Quantity depends on where you are going, who you are going with and what you plan to do. I

This is off the top of my head. Should handle burns, breaks and lacerations, your primary concerns. I also like to have a smoke grenade if I can get one. This is after having a helicopter spend ages hovering about nearby looking for me.

I'm fairly sinister when making scenarios for role play. I agree role play is awful in terms of awkwardness, but that is the point. Vastly less awful than the real thing. One of my favorites is the "your party member has slipped on rocks in the river bed and has a compound fracture of the lower leg, you were rushing because of the weather, the water is rising".

This has the modern first aid trainer completely stuffed. It is a very realistic scenario, and it requires you to stabilize the leg and move the injured person very quickly. You will need to splint that leg and whip a strong stretcher up. 25 years ago my squad of 8-12 year old boy scouts could have got this done in about 10 minutes. The modern first aid course where they fast forward though all this stuff on the training video? Maybe not so much. Cracks me up the training I got as a young kid which they would no longer teach to adults.