Practicing life saving skills with a little added competition!
Last month Sandstone Director Tim Bradshaw was asked to deliver a keynote session on enabling resilience as part of Spirit Energy's Safety Conference in Zandvoort, Holland. In the build up to the event the organisers asked if we knew any team building activities to really engage the team utilising the miles of sand that are Zandvoort sea front.
The solution was a Save a Life team building session. This was a short sharp high intensity session that taught 3 life saving skills and then put them into practice in the form of a race.
Each crew learned to stop a life threatening bleed, deliver CPR, use an AED and prevent hypothermia. Once they had mastered the basics as a team (a number of the guys work off shore so had a great grasp of the principles) they raced against each other to save a casualty. The team were super engaged and highly competitive!
As I write this article I can feel the old and bold twitching and sucking in on their teeth! Was this taught properly? You shouldn't be running to an incident etc etc!
It's time to reframe this type of training and activity.
The outcome was to enhance communication and create hands on team building. The alternatives would be standard team building activities that are neither relevant nor engaging.
The basic skills were taught in a simple hands on practical manner. Similar to those we used when teaching volunteers in Ukraine. The aim is not to teach a first aid course but to deliver life saving skills.
The competition element is not designed to replicate real life scenarios but to help teams understand when we apply pressure to a situation skills that were simple in a class room take on a new light. Planning, practice and communication become mission critical.
This is real team building only the exercises used to facilitate it may just help someone save a life!