So lockdown has kept nearly all of us off the field for a long time and so there's not been a lot of Nerf to post about. However, one of my other 'hobbies' is basically first aid and gear needed to respond in an emergency. The day job sees me working in a UK Major Trauma Centre (Tier 1 to you US folks) and I've developed a bit of a fetish for response kit as a result.
Within the Nerf hobby, the majority of things we're going to deal with are scrapes, cuts and bruises and the occassional dart to the eye. As a rule, a general HSE compliant travel or half dozen personal first aid kit will do the job if you throw in a couple of bottles of sterile eye wash and some eye dressings to manage any eye pro failures. I'd also advise a nasal cannula and a 20mL syringe to make irrigation easier, see this technique from the guys over at Real First aid on how to effectively do it without water boarding someone.
Personal first aid:
If you've got your First Aid at Work or Emergency First Aid at Work certification then carrying a small HSE compliant kit on you at all times is worth it. It lets you self-treat your own injuries and can keep the load off the organisational team if you are competant and confident to treat other low level injuries. The most important thing to remember is to report and record anything that you're not self-treating so the Game Organiser can keep track of incidents as necessary.
Kit List:
This is my recommended basic first aid kit for players and Game Organisers:
- Emergency First Aid Kit - Sometimes just getting the refills and making sourcing your own bag is better (that's what I usually do).
- Saline eye wash
- Nasal cannula - for eye irrigation
- 20mL syringe - makes pouring the eye wash into the cannula a lot easier. Make sure to get Luer Slip and not Luer Lok.
The rest of this post covers my explorations on the themes of kit
carriage for hypothetical Nerf medical situations based on my skills and
training. 99.99% of all incidents will be covered by the advice I've
provided above. A simple travel First Aid kit and some sterile eye wash
is all you need for most Nerf stuff.
Can I be sued for providing First Aid?
UK law basically says that if you attend a casualty and do what someone trained to your level of competance would reasonably be expected to do then you're covered from being sued. Provided you raise the alarm and follow the instructions of the call handler, you're basically fine. It's OK to panic, freak out and generally go sideways in an emergency provided you raise the alarm and seek help. Now, that means that there are different levels of skills out there and what we can and can't do. The rest of this post covers stuff that I am equipped and trained to deal with. Some of it will be beyond the usual First Aid at Work certificates but that's because I've been trained and signed off as competant by registered professionals to do these things. Remember, if you've not been trained then an emergency isn't the time to have a go!
Trauma Panel 1:
So this was my first effort at a Trauma Panel. The idea is when dealing with a casualty, the first thing you deal with is personal protection and any major bleeding. The most serious injury I can feasibly imagine in Nerf is an open compound fracture to a lower limb as a result of running into a pot hole or badger set in the woods. With that, you're going to get a potentially open wound so you need to be ready to stem any heavy bleeding and shield the injury from infection as fast as possible while awaiting help. The idea of this trauma pouch was to carry 1 trauma bandage, some gloves, a tourniquet and a pair of trauma shears.
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| 1st iteration of a 'Trauma Panel' Contains everything to manage danger and Cat Haem (in theory) |
The glove pouch worked really well here. It's essentially a box of fabric with two pieces of elastic sewn part over each other to form the access panel at the front. If I were to do this again, I'd probably just opt for two regular pieces of fabric since the elastic isn't as stiff as I'd like. I actually used this design on a glove pouch that I used for work for several months in a non-hospital job. Gloves should always be the first thing you put on in any situation, no matter how hairy. It gives you time to breath and assess the situation rather than barelling in. I think glove pouches should be on the outside of every first aid kit so you can straight up go for those before you start rummaging for other kit.
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| Pouch with gloves show, trauma shears and a CAT tourniquet in orange. |
The big pouch on the right contains a CAT tourniquet. It's the bright orange civilian variant and there are pen loops on the side I can shove a Sharpie in to write the time the tourniquet was applied on. It's a last resort thing and something I would only ever both with for outdoor games where the ground is very uneven. I actually didn't include it in later iterations of my Nerf IFAK.
The slot I sewed for the trauma bandage was supposed to sit behind the glove pouch but it turned out to be far, far too small for it so this panel doesn't carry one. Future iterations would certainly see a spot for the trauma bandage because it's such an essential piece of kit if you're in a situation where you need a tourniquet.
Finally, there's a slot for my trauma shears. These are a pair of Leatherman Raptors that have a bunch of nifty features on them but the most important thing is that they will cut boot and bike leather without breaking a sweat so if I need to get in to control a bleed then I can without risking cutting the casualty.
Proto-IFAK:
An IFAK is an Individual First Aid Kit and should carry pretty much everything you need for a single person. I originally envisaged a 180x180x100mm box with a trauma panel on the front. Unfortunately, it came out to 180x180x150mm due to some measure errors so with the trauma panel on the front, it ended up being super fat.
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| Long boi is loooong! |
So with that in mind, I cut the Trauma Panel off the front panel and it left just a basic zip closure IFAK.
It doesn't look like much but it has plenty of space inside for everything I need. The first thing I'll need to do is to hand sew a bunch of loop tape on the front so I can stick a medic patch to it so folks know what is inside.
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| High contrast interior and lots of slot pouches. |
I selected lime green as the interior for high contrast. It frustrates me that some gear makers think you have to be tactical all of the time. If I've got this pouch open then the time for concealment and subtlety is in the past. If your GO doesn't stop the game to let you treat a casualty, you need a new game! Same with black gloves, how are you supposed to write key obs on a black glove? Seriously, your medic kit doesn't need to be tactical - it needs to provide relief to a person.
There are lots of individual slot pockets for putting different things in. I don't like zip pouches or velcro flaps inside a kit, I want to be able to get to everything right away. Ideally, I'd like to be able to get to it with just one hand if necessary because if I've got one hand holding a bleed then fiddling with straps, flaps and loops is just annoying.
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| Clam shell opening but doesn't open flat because it'll hang on a belt and I don't want gear dropping all over the place! |
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| Removable panels, each with a set function. Left is a wound irrigation panel while right carries a set of conforming bandages that can be used for all sorts of useful things. |
The Velcro removable panels let me adjust the kit as I need to. The wall panels can carry things I will always need like notepaper, tape, plasters and gloves while the interior can be adjusted to my specific event. A larger outdoor event with pyro and higher powered blasters will include burns dressings, more trauma bandages (to cover the risk of injury from uneven ground) while a event catered more to younger players and lower power will include more plasters, dressings and even stickers and lollipops because paediatric have slightly different needs than adults.
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| All of this mounted with my normal MOLLE/belt mounting system |
Trauma Panel 2:
Remember I said I cut the trauma panel from the front of the IFAK? Well, I needed something to do with it so I turned it into a stand alone panel with space for a bandage, a pair of gloves and my shears.
It looks nice and tasty like that with the medic patch on the front. I essentially reused off cuts and spare parts from the main IFAK to create the panel. The trauma bandage is held down with an elastic loop ala my magazine pouches because it was a little loose and I didn't want to lose it in the field. This is the sort of pouch you can shove on a drop-leg panel out of the way and only need it for the absolute emergencies. That or it makes a nice gift for someone... This was made to reuse parts I'd already cut so I'm not sure if I will actually end up using it.
Beyond the basics:
I mentioned earlier that having training and competancies is essential for delivering safe and effective first aid. Well, there are spaces where I am competant but I wouldn't want to carry all the kit in the field with me. There is just some equipment that you would need brought to you. Things like an AED for managing heart attacks need to stay in the car. Most things like airway adjuncts, bag valve masks and other resuscitation equipment is best left back in the safe zone in a brightly coloured bag so you can send a runner for it should you need to. There's no need to carry all of your kit with you, just the immediate stuff to deal with the first few steps on the DR(C)ABC algorithm.
That said, some slightly more advanced bits of bit like a pulse oximeter wouldn't hurt to be carried with you. Those are dead handy and give you a live reading of pulse and oxygen saturation which you can use to either guide treatment or relay to the 999 call handler to give them a better picture of what's happening.
This has been a brief walk through my exploration of first aid equipment for Nerf and my thinking on how to keep people safe. This is all about preparation, I've only ever had to treat minor cuts and bruises at wars but it always pays to be prepared. Plus, it's not like I've got any actual foam flinging to do in the next few months while this plague ravages our civilisation... ¬¬
