Time has flown by and it’s hard to believe it’s nearly the end of the penultimate week! It’s been a promising week with significant progress having been made:
- I finished extracting the relevant data from DIPS for the fifth and final district within South West Region and plotted the graphs to present this. There is a lot of data that I’ve collated, so I need to consider how best to present my results when I start to write my report.
- The survey I created has been distributed via the South West Region mailing list with great results. After the slow response initially, I’ve now had over 100 responses, which is much more than I had anticipated!
- I’ve worked through each of the surveys to pick out the comments/improvements that volunteers would like to receive in their training and this will be included in my final report. It’s really interesting getting the perspective of other volunteers from all areas of the region as it highlights specific areas of the region where more focussed training on a particular topic could be implemented. It also shows what’s going well already, but also what more could potentially be done for volunteers.
- I’ve had a few more training programmes back from unit managers across the region, although this is still fewer than I would have liked. However, the training programmes I have got are really useful and again it’s interesting to see the similarities but also the differences between the training delivered to volunteers across the South West Region.
- I’ve also kindly been given specific injury data for 3 major running events held in Central District (Bristol 10k, Bath Half Marathon and Bristol-Bath Marathon). It was intriguing to see the nature of the injuries that St John Ambulance treated and as a result led to me researching further information about the most common injuries, not only to further my first aid/medical knowledge but also to create a training presentation specific to running injuries. Having spoken to some current volunteers and after viewing the online training folder, it was apparent that currently there isn’t a bank/source with resources that units can access to deliver first aid teaching. Therefore, I’ve put together a presentation with the most commonly treated running injuries, with the long-term vision that further presentations/resources may be put together into a general resource bank that anyone can access to further their training. I feel the running injuries presentation may be useful to a wide range of units, as having looked through the duties covered throughout 2015, running events are covered all over the region so the information would be useful and applicable to volunteers out on duty.
- I’ve also met up with both my project supervisors to update them on my progress so far. They’ve also been able to get me specific injury data for the ‘Mid-Devon Show’, and having looked through the injuries treated, it highlights the importance of first aid training with respect to bites, stings and allergies as these accounted for over a third (36%) of the patients treated. I’ll be meeting with them again this afternoon hopefully to discuss the final report.
Heading into the final week, my focus will be on writing the report and presenting my findings. I will also look to put forward suggestions for training development as per the survey responses.