Alistair Greenough

This week team members Alistair Greenough and Michael Wakerley attended a five day course on managing searches for people missing from home courtesy of Lancashire Police.  Students on the course were a mixture of serving police officers from Lancashire, members from Bolton MRT, Bowland Pennine MRT, Rossendale and Pendle MRT, Bay Search and Rescue as well as colleagues from Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service.

The course was made up of a mix of classroom sessions interspersed with small group exercises looking at the behaviors of people missing from home and strategies that can be used to help find them.  A very interesting session was provided by representatives from the Alzheimer’s Society which gave a great insight into how best we might plan searches for people with dementia who have gone missing from home.  At the end of the session we were all given the opportunity to become “Dementia Friends”.

The final 2 days took us outside to look at map to ground interpretation to give better appreciation of what the ground we would ask people to search actually looks like and how difficult or easy it might be.  Finally on the Saturday Bolton MRT hosted the final exercise where 2 of the students acted as search managers while the rest formed search parties with other members Bolton team to search the moors for a “Missing Walker”, kindly played by team member Mike Jones’s son Oliver who put up with very cold and wet conditions to allow us to put into practice what we had learned so huge thanks to him.

While the aim of the course was to educate us around search management which it did in masses it also provided an opportunity for us to meet people from other teams and services, to get to know their faces and them us so that when we do get called to a real search we know each other a little better which may certainly influence the efficiency and outcome of any search efforts.

Finally we would all like to give a massive thanks to the staff from Lancashire Police who facilitated the course and for allowing team members to attend.  This is an incredibly generous act by Lancashire Police which will most certainly help us to help our community in the future.

Team members Nigel Booth and Alistair Greenough travelled to Liverpool today to attend a training day on the practicalities of carrying out medical care of a casualty suspended at height.  The day was led by Phil Keating a rope rescue and access instructor and Andy Baker MIC and rope access instructor (also previous service in the RAF Mountain Rescue Service).  The day was kindly facilitated by John Dagger of Complete Training Solutions who not only provided the location in their rope access training centre but also provided lunch.  Massive thanks to John and his staff.

The students on the day came from a variety of backgrounds and included police medics, IRATA rope access technicians, industrial paramedics, fire service technical rescue members, mountain rescue and lowland search and rescue volunteers plus paramedics from various NHS trusts and an A&E consultant.  The variety of students leant itself to a really good mix of experience and technical skills in both the roped access and pre hospital care worlds.

The day focused on personal safety, casualty safety and doing simple skills really well and realising that interventions with casualties in these environments should only be carried out if they are absolutely necessary and the best medicine is the rescue itself.

The facilities at complete training solutions were perfect to allow maximum realism with a high level of safety required for great scenarios.  Once again thanks to Phil, Andy, John and all the staff for putting the day on.

Today 7 members of our rope rescue team were joined by 2 members from Holme Valley MRT, Owen Phillips and Kevin Robinson to take part in refreshing skills learned on the rope rescue operators course at Lyon Equipment in September this year

.  Skills concentrated on were passing a knot on lowering and raising, raising using pulley systems, vertical lower and raise using a “Barrow Boy” and deviations in the rope system.   With Owen and Kevin visiting from Holme Valley it gave a great opportunity to share ideas and thoughts.