Transcript

Towards the end of my Cadet career, I was actually selected to represent England in the International First Aid Championships in Hong Kong in 2016. So when I did that there were twenty of us going and we actually had competitions to see which four of us – because they had three that they’d already marked down, and I, you know, I had only just signed up and they were looking for one more person. They picked me because they wanted me to demonstrate that talking is such a key part in medicine as well, it’s not just applying that plaster, you need to know why in the context. And it was a really fun experience being in Hong Kong.

I thought the competition was a little bit hard and a little bit unexpected but I guess, you know, they tried to base it on what would happen in a camp site. So I was expecting, you know, someone who fell over, but I guess it’s an international competition so they made it slightly harder. I walked in with my colleague and they were like, oh this Cadet has been shot through the heart with an arrow, what do you do? And there was just an arrow on the floor and there was a guy holding a red piece of paper going, ow, ow. And I think what was terrifying about it, in that respect, was not the actual situation itself but the fact that what they’d done is they’d use police tape to kind of rope it off on the inside. And then they’d sat everyone around, so you had an audience of about forty to fifty people. So it wasn’t just you get timed in a room like your normal assessment, it was the fact you had that crowd and I think we did quite well. I think we placed fourth overall for our highest thing, which was the marching, no we placed third for the marching, fourth for duos, and I think we placed, I think sixth for the solos is what I did. The solos it was slings, I’ve got to be honest with you, slings are my nemesis, I always make them look like handbags, so I was – I thought I did pretty well for sixth, that was quite good considering how many countries went. And I did the slings for the solos, it was shot through the heart for duos, for the group one it was someone had a spinal injury, someone fell out of a tree, someone was going to save them and he had the triage and he had to send people different ways. And they really liked our communication and our triaging, but the favourite one was drill because we only won on a technicality because Hong Kong decided that instead of judging everyone on just their marching skills, they actually set it up like a Mario session, so you actually had to – the aim of the game wasn’t to mark people on their marching, it was to see how many coins the Cadets could get as you directed them round the maze. So we didn’t actually win because we were the best marchers, we won because we collected the most coins in their Mario Kart version competition in the International First Aid Championships. And I will still hold to this very day that I came third in a realistic marching drill championships because we collected more gold coins than someone else who was actually probably better at drill than we were. So it was a very weird competition but overall, it was something that I will probably tell my grandkids, it was that fun, it was definitely something that I’ll never forget.