Half of the calls responded to by North Shore Rescue over 25 years were so serious, a patient needed in-hospital medical assessment, a new study has found.
The analysis of search and rescue incident reports on the North Shore Mountains between 1995 and 2019 was published this year in the peer-reviewed Wilderness & Environmental Medicine journal.
Its findings suggest there is need for “evidence-based guidelines and core training competencies” in medicine for mountain search and rescue teams.
“We train hard and we train for what we see,” said co-author Dr. Alec Ritchie, an emergency room physician at Lions Gate Hospital and North Shore Rescue’s medical team lead.
“Now that we know what we see, that’ll influence the type of training we do, what type of equipment we try to get, fundraising requests and that sort of thing.”
The research team scoured nearly 2,100 calls and included 906 subjects, 65 per cent of whom were men, in the analysis. The top three activities involved in the cases studied were hiking, biking and snow sports.
Researchers used the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics severity score to grade whether incidents were classified as medically traumatic. Fifty-four per cent fell under the category of “trauma,” with the top three body regions impacted being the lower limbs, the head and the torso.
Other calls had nothing to do with sports but involved other serious, unrelated medical issues for which treatment was far away. Of the incidents deemed “non-traumatic,” the study found mental health crises, exposure and cardiovascular incidents were the top three causes of rescue calls.
“By non-trauma, I mean a medical issue that is not caused by an accident or force,” Ritchie explained on 980 CKNW’s The Jill Bennett Show on Thursday afternoon.
“With 41 per cent being non-trauma, we were quite surprised.”
North Shore Rescue is a volunteer-based search and rescue team that operates every day of the year as one of the oldest of its kind in Canada. It responds to about 130 calls per year.
All of its volunteers have first aid training, Ritchie said, and the advanced medical team is available to handle more severe medical calls.