WAFA- A Leadership Advancement Opportunity

This wonderful week our students have been taking a break from their normal lives here at Alzar School, and to get a little practice in the field of Wilderness Medicine. This week they are roaming around campus, covered in artificial blood and injuries (called “moulage”) and taking care of each other’s make-believe injuries as they take part in a Wilderness Advanced First Aid course, or WAFA. As the students learn new vocabulary like “intracranial pressure” and new skills like the “focused spine assessment” they are slowly adding to their repertoire of leadership abilities. The students are becoming better and better at many of the 10 Elements of Leadership as they learn and practice more elements in action (for a full list of the 10 Elements of Leadership check out this page: https://alzar.org/about/faq/).

Of course our students are becoming more technically proficient through this course through the vast number of new skills they are acquiring, but I would like to spend a moment to think about the other ways in which this course is helping them to develop as leaders. One way, is that this course helps them to develop and practice in the realms of “360˚ Thinking” and “Accurate Awareness” (two of the 10 Elements of Leadership). In each scenario, which generally follow some preparatory lecture, the students receive minimal help from the WAFA Instructor, and instead are asked to rely on what they have learned – and what they can glean by thinking about the whole picture (360 Thinking) – to provide the best possible care. They do not know if their “patient” in the scenario is diabetic, or has a broken back, or is even conscious before arriving to the scene; they must use their investigative skills to build a finely-tuned “Accurate Awareness” of the patient’s chief complaints. Only then can they figure out not only how to treat the patient, but if it is necessary (and how it would be possible), to “evacuate” the “patient” out of the field. They need to look around, at their situation, their location, the entirety of their patient, and need to do so in a timely manner. As the students go through this course, they are visibly becoming better and better at looking for more clues (and better clues) to offer up the best solution. The development in each student, day by day in “360˚ Thinking” and “Accurate Awareness” is impressive to watch as our students become better and better life-savers and leaders.

Two other elements of leadership in these scenarios that our students also get to practice are “Communication Skills” and “Resiliency and Resourcefulness.” If they are on the rescue team they are asked to communicate not only amongst each other but with their patient. They need to be able to work together with their partners, and to do so efficiently, and may need to communicate in more ways than one. Often they would coordinate their patient care with few words, each student was able to recognize where in the process their co-rescuer was, and what was coming next. Other times they would exchange ideas on how to best treat their patient, and how to respond if their situation changes. Throughout WAFA they must be “Resilient and Resourceful” as they need to be able to adapt to changes as the patient expresses new issues that may not line up with their initial plan, and need to use only the limited resources they have to make the best fix. This has included cutting up t-shirts to use as bandages, using any sort of long and stiff implement to make a splint and sometimes even having the patient as a medical tool by having them use their hands to apply pressure or use one extremity to splint the other one.

WAFA is a course designed to teach students how to respond to medical emergencies in the wilderness by increasing technical skills and knowledge. Perhaps more importantly, however, our students build transferable leadership skills through learning to team-problem solve in high-stress environments. I feel that each student will walk away from WAFA with newfound leadership and medical confidence that will manifest itself in many ways, and that each student is capable of handling many wilderness emergencies that life may throw their way.