The Wilderness Medicine Elective seeks to provide participants with an understanding of the injuries and illnesses that children might sustain in the course of outdoor activities or while traveling to wilderness areas or foreign countries.
Children are likely to encounter many of these problems in their own backyards or city parks. Animal attacks and bites, insect stings, snake or scorpion envenomations, plant ingestions, submersion injury, heat illness, frostbite and hypothermia are all injuries that occur in urban and suburban locations as well as the wilderness.
This is a hands-on elective. The centerpiece is a four-day field experience run by an experienced search and rescue paramedic.
Participants run through a realistic set of field "emergencies"—a remote car accident, a person who has fallen into a river and become hypothermic, a climber who has fallen and sustained severe trauma.
The elective also includes field trips, workshops (splinting and orthopedic examination skills), and a range of lectures from local experts in wilderness and environmental emergencies and travel medicine.