Our Society
The St John Ambulance LINKS society has been training University of Essex students and staff for nearly 15 years. In this time we have trained thousands of individuals how to take the simple steps required to save someone’s life and many of our members have gone even further and become nurses, paramedics or event control room operators.
As a society we meet at least once a week to train our society members in basic first aid. We also host official St John Ambulance courses, in our most recent training course (shown above) 12 new volunteers became Trainee First Aiders (TFA).
Our members also get the chance to join St John Ambulance and volunteer at events across the UK including London marathon (shown above), V festival and also on campus events in SubZero.
Our Story
Over the last few years we have built up a collection of basic training equipment such as resus Anne dolls and AED (Automated External Defibrillator) trainers which are used to train what to do if a person stops breathing. This has helped us grow as a society and now this life saving knowledge is reaching more people than ever.
However, for the past 10 years we have been using a small casualty simulation kit as part of our training, we now need your help to expand this kit so it can meet the needs of our society and make our training even better.
Our small casualty simulation kit has been used at countless events and has survived the test of time but it is now far too small for our needs and parts of the kit which can be used up have long since run out. We are now using this equipment more than we ever have and we feel that it is not meeting the needs of the society.
This is why we are running a CLICK project and fundraising to purchase a larger kit which will enable us to improve the effectiveness of our training.
What is Casualty Simulation and why do we do it?
Moulage (Casualty simulation) is the art of applying mock injuries for the purpose of training emergency response teams and other medical personnel.
Casualty simulation help to improve a students learning by taking a dull power point presentation or boring worksheet and creating an exciting interactive scenario where students can put their skills to the test in a safe and supportive environment.
How will the equipment help others in the universities wider community
With this kit we will be able to simulate larger incidents with multiple casualties. With terrorist attacks and Mass Casualty Incidents (MCI’s) becoming more frequent we have teamed up with the new charity citizenAID who provide advice and guidance on ‘Public immediate actions in the event of a Stabbing, Shooting or a Bombing’. We have already had one successful event in which Brigadier Timothy Hodgetts CBE one of the founders of citizenAID came to the university in October. Your support will also help us to work with citizen aid to put on Mass Casualty Incident scenarios for our members and others in the universities extended community.
The equipment you will help to fund will also be available when we are working in collaboration with other societies on campus as well as other local units of St John Ambulance. Below is a photo of an exercise we helped to put on this year at our local division in Colchester.
We also have strong links to a specialist Medical Responce Team (MRT) with St John Ambulance. Last year, with help from the Juggling society, we used the small kit we have to put on a major incident scenario event for them (photo below) we hope with your support we will be able to put on an even bigger event this year.
Where will the money go?
With your help we will purchase a large casualty simulation kit and several additional moulages.
The kit includes a large selection of strap on wounds which are connected to a blood bag, these wounds bleed in the same way as a real injury and allow students to see how well they have bandaged or treated a wound.
This kit will cost us £1683.26 minimum but we are hoping to Fundraise £2000 to help cover costs or other items such as plastic sheets, props, tape, gloves and clothing which we use in our scenario based training.
Rewards
We have a selection of rewards available to everyone who donates. Thank you soo much for your support, we cannot thank you enough.
Everyone who donates to this project will be invited to our event on the Colchester campus on March 24th where we will be putting on a Mass Casualty Incident where you can be one of the casualties wearing the equipment you helped to fund.
Find us here
To find out more about our activities and to hear how we are getting on with out fundraising follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/EssexLINKS.
