The Heiniken of First Responders.

Reaching the parts that other medics can’t reach.

There’s a special brand of medicine that is called upon in mountain rescue, owing to the remote and sometimes hostile situations in which we are deployed. People can take ill or come a cropper in the hills in any number of ways. The majority of our medical callouts involve excessive cold (hypothermia), excessive heat (dehydration and heat exhaustion), and lower-leg injuries. However, during my time in the team, we have been called upon to deal with broken pelvis, broken femur, spinal injury, skull fracture, stroke, heart attack, cardiac arrest, dislocations, and seizures. In fact - malady and mishap besetting just about any part of the body you can name.

To diagnose and deal with all this, often in extreme weather and difficult terrain with limited equipment available, we spend a lot of time on first aid training. All MR volunteers are required to pass a 2-day outdoor emergency first aid course every three years. This gives us all a solid grounding in the basics of mountain medicine, and for those who wish to pursue it further, there’s the extremely demanding and rigorous Remote Rescue Medical Technician (RRMT) qualification, the assessment for which has been known to turn hitherto hardy mountain men and women into a quivering mess.

The last weekend in November saw the entire team undertake the three-yearly mountain first aid course. We are incredibly fortunate in BSARU in boasting a couple of extraordinarily gifted and respected medics in the team. For many years, our medical officer was Steve, a high-ranking ambulance paramedic who combines decades of experience with a particular (and sometimes peculiar!!) talent for communication.

Steve handed on the baton a few years ago, and it has now landed in the sure, steady and compassionate hands of Evelyn, a nurse of 35 years standing who, in a long and varied career, has spent a lot of time dealing with trauma in A&E and now works with the British Association of Ski Patrollers, routinely scraping twisted and broken skiiers off the slopes. She has been involved with emergency care and resuscitation training for a quarter of a century, both in the UK and in New Zealand. Evelyn was joined by a BASP colleague, Keith, who has an equally impressive résumé, and together they took us through an intensive syllabus designed to equip us for most of the scenarios we are likely to encounter. The world-class delivery of a pretty packed weekend of theory and hands-on practice left us all feeling better informed and more confident in our medical ability.

In other news, an extraordinary milestone was reached recently, when Kelso’s Brian Tyson chalked up 40 years as a mountain rescue volunteer. This is something that very, very few achieve, and it represents an almost inconceivable level of commitment and dedication. Hats off to you, Brian!

BSARU wishes you all a prosperous and safe 2026. Look after yourselves and each other, get involved in the community and remember, we are only as great as the least of us.

As always, you can donate to the team and support our essential work at www.bordersar.org.uk