As a tree surgeon, arborist or forestry worker you routinely work in hazardous environments.
This is why you need a specialist type of First Aid Course, Forestry +.
Planning
Catastrophic bleeding, falling from height and working with toxic chemicals, are daily risks.
How you plan, manage and risk assess every job will have a major impact on you and your team.
Many of your customers will have guidelines requiring you and your team to have a First Aid qualification. e.g. The Forestry Commission First Aid Policy
It’s your duty of care to your employees to ensure training is specific to the dangers involved.
By training your whole team in who to call, and how to alert specialist services, such as the mountain rescue teams.
They need to have adequate communications; mobile phones need good signals if not you require radios.
You should always be appropriately dressed with the correct personal protection equipment.
Catastrophic Bleeding
They must have First Aid kits with tourniquets and haemostatic dressings and the knowledge how to use them.
Severing arteries and veins can be fatal in minutes so being able to act quickly is essential.
Your team need to know how to treat amputations, not just controlling the bleeding but treating shock.
They will often be working at height, their injuries can mean they’re trapped and need aerial rescue or have fallen and have head and spinal injuries.
By recognising these life-threatening injuries early and starting treatment, makes a difference to survival.
Crush Injuries
Being crushed by falling trees or unstable loads are other dangers faced by tree surgeons.
These type of injuries require you to have specialist knowledge of when it is safe to release their entrapment.
By removing whatever is crushing the casualty, without knowing when it happened could easily kill them.
Embedded Objects
Occasionally, as a tree surgeon you may encounter embedded wounds where trees have “exploded” into shards of wood.
Some trees, particularly, ash shatter and the wooden shrapnel is extremely dangerous. Oak tree explodes
Therefore, by understanding the reason not to remove embedded objects and how to dress the wound you could save a life.
Other Injuries and Illnesses
Burns
You need to understand treating burns both from hot surfaces and chemicals, away access to water, using cooling gel dressings.
Hypothermia
Teams working in winter must be able to treat the effects of extreme cold, hypothermia, doing the wrong thing can be fatal
Bites
Finally, they should be alert for ticks carrying Lyme Disease and alert for snake bites.
If you work in the forest or in similar environments your First Aid training is vitally important and should be specific to the role.
Our Forestry + course includes all these special elements together with the standard First Aid at Work syllabus.
Ask about it now
Please note the Forestry plus course is supplementary to Level 3 First Aid at Work or Level 3 Emergency First Aid at Work