When Dr Paul Ransom first volunteered to join HALO's medical board in 1999 it comprised only a few members in the medical group, one of whom is now HALO's trustee Jane Davis. At the time HALO had fewer than 3,000 staff and worked in under 10 countries.
Today HALO's 13,000 employees in around 30 countries can call on a medical board of 35 people led by Paul and Jane. The medical board is a group of volunteer doctors, nurses and paramedics who give up their time to keep HALO's deminers safe through training, direct medical advice and by developing our medical policies.
Accidents are very rare, but HALO has a duty of care to its staff to ensure we are as prepared as we can be. That includes training deminers as paramedics and ensuring HALO vehicles can double as ambulances.
In this year's New Year's Honours list Paul, who is a consultant in emergency medicine at Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton, UK, was awarded an OBE for services to UK health support overseas, partly for his work with HALO and partly with UK-Med, the emergency crisis response NGO.
Also on the New Year's OBE list was Dr Andy Kent, a consultant trauma and orthopaedic surgeon for NHS Highlands who also works with HALO and UK-Med.
"HALO's training manual deals with blast injuries, breaks and fractures. We were one of the first organisations to implement the use of tranexamic acid in the field to limit bleeding. A great deal of how we respond to accidents relates to the isolation of where our teams work."
Members of HALO's medical board visit each HALO programme around once a year, not only to oversee medical training, but also to monitor casualty evacuation plans and check local hospitals to ensure they have the resources to deal with trauma cases. Every HALO minefield team contains at least two staff trained as deminer-paramedics. Every minefield has, as it's first order of business, the creation of a medical aid point with trauma kit, stretcher and sheltered location.
The key components of HALO medicine are controlling bleeding and the rapid use of antibiotics, analgesia and fluids. But there are other important training the medical board undertakes: "We give our paramedics training in the clinical skills they regularly practice so they are highly adept at immediate care. But when you work in pre-hospital care, scene management is really important. The paramedics have to understand how to delegate correctly and work through an internal check list to get everything done, as well as ensure the scene is safe for the whole team 鈥� whether in a highway or in a minefield."
Every HALO team includes trained paramedics
Paul's role also involves representing HALO on the international boards that set the standards for minefield medical care across the landmine clearance sector.
He says: "We train paramedics to deal with the injuries they are likely to see and use appropriate tried and tested technology. A defibrillator, for example, is not much use in this environment. We use paramedics who are also de-miners so that they know the dangers, speak the language and can use their first aid and medical skills for their own communities or even work in a medical capacity after the country has been declared safe from mines."
In addition to the medical board, HALO has partnerships with other providers, incluidng the Dumfries & Galloway Royal Infirmary for field officer medical induction training 鈥� including mental health first aid. We also partner with civilian-military researchers on the potential impact of repeated explosions on the hearing of long term staff.
