Forward Alliance Civilian Crisis Response Program

Between July 17th and November 4th, Forward Alliance conducted 110 training lessons and trained 4,451 people. This brings to a total of 270 training lessons and 10,581 trained civilians since December 2023. 

During this quarter, collaboration with public and private organizations like civil defense team, conscripts, law enforcement, and private enterprises continued to expand. Another accomplishment worth mentioning this quarter is our annual exercise in September with respect to the Taiwan National Disaster Prevention Day. The exercise successfully incorporate the FA trained volunteers to work with like minded philanthropy organization in a mock disaster situation. FA trained volunteers were also able to demonstrate their new acquired skills like using drones for disaster site preliminary observations and shelter management.

We not only work relentlessly in offering physical trainings, but also bringing in helpful online content to Taiwan community. A translated version of "The Paediatric Blast Injury Field Manual" by Paediatric Blast Injury Partnership, PBIP was offered free to everyone online, and free physical copies for hospital upon request. We would like to give a special thanks to our volunteers who helped make this happen. 

We would like to share more details about what we do in our Field Medical Care Training Course. The focus of this course is triaging for patients and communicating effectively with emergency responders during a mass casualty incident. Participants will practice under simulated scenarios including patient movement, bleeding control, and airway management.

Feedback from participants

“Understanding field trauma assessment and the detailed symptoms of MARCH is utterly crucial. As a civilian who loves hiking, the part about hypothermia grabs my attention. When I went home that night, I added a couple of emergency items that would help keep me warm if I got stranded in the mountains.”

“I took my kids to do the training together today. The instructors were very patient with them. Now I have some ideas on how to keep my family safe and help others during crisis.”  

“Thank you for designing scenarios for practice. It gave me a chance to react to a “real crisis”, and face my weakness.”

“In this team exercise, I realized that we (fellow trainees) don’t know how to be a leader. Is there going to be a leadership course in the future? For example, we need to learn how to give orders, and what orders to give. In the Q&A session at the end of the course, my teammate and I realized that leaders should not jump to the rescue right away. Maybe it would be beneficial to all trainees for the instructors to do a demonstration. We would like to see how it is done in the real world, what would a leader do, and how would others react to the order.”

Links:

• Forward Alliance Trainings
• The Paediatric Blast Injury Field Manual (Trad. Ch. Version)
• Vice President Hsiao visited FA exercise (video)

Between April 1st and July 17th, Forward Alliance conducted 74 training lessons and trained 3,501 people. This brings to a total of 154 training lessons and 6935 trained civilians since December 2023. 

During this quarter, We have collaborated with several unique organizations, ie. Civil Defense Team, Criminal Investigation Bureau, Special Police Forces, Substitute Military Service, Continuing Education held by local churches (Eastgate Presbyterian church, Taiwan Creative Content Agency, and private enterprises. 

We want to share more details about what we do in our Advanced Bleed Control Training Course. Statistics show that uncontrolled bleeding is the number one cause of preventable death from trauma. 

Advanced Bleed Control

In this course, participants will learn how to identify bleeding sources, manage life-threatening bleeding, and practice tourniquet application, wound packing, and bandaging techniques. We will explain more in detail about field trauma assessment, and trauma symptoms of massive bleeding, airway, respiration, circulation, disability, hypothermia, and head trauma. The participants will also learn more about how to do the initial treatment before the first responder arrives, for example, head-to-toe assessment and wound management.  

Feedback from participants

“The introduction of the tourniquet is very intriguing. There are three types of tourniquets for us to try and practice on. FA also has fake silicon limbs that shoot out fake blood for us to practice wound packing. I had to put a lot of pressure to stop the fake bleeding.”

“Thank you, FA for trying to improve the training courses constantly. I happened to participate in both the older module and the improved module of this course. The improved module included a lot more practical training exercises which are very helpful for me and other trainees. I would definitely recommend it to my friends!”

“The course instructors focus on interaction with the participants. It would be great if the instructors could do a quick recap after each small session. It will certainly help everyone in the learning process.” 

“The course flows smoothly. If you take Field Medical Care and Advanced Bleed Control consecutively, you will get to repeat the exercises many times.”

“The course is great! Very easy to understand and follow. I also enjoy the scenario practice  which tests everyone’s teamwork skills.”

“The training content is very solid and I have learned a lot from it. I have been to other trainings provided by other organizations in Taiwan, and I think FA has some very competitive content.  

“I think this training course requires a certain degree of medical knowledge to be able to fully understand. Trying to explain and deliver this course in a half-day setting is not easy. I think the time constraint limits the potential and effectiveness of the course. It is easy to follow the operational instructions during the lecture, but not so easy when it comes to scenario practices. Without the guidance of instructors, I don’t think I will be able to help the survivor. 

Therefore, I am a little frustrated with my inability to master this course. 

Recently, I heard that similar training abroad would take up to three days. For example, Hostile Environment Awareness Training + First Aid, (HEAT+F) in Great Britain or GM risk group in Australia. It’s just a suggestion for you to consider when designing future training courses. I am happy to see any kind of advanced training or refresher courses in the future, as well as in the southern part of Taiwan.

I am a slow learner. It would help if a checklist is provided with the instructions. The complexity of demonstration and instruction should increase slowly. It would be very helpful if we could register extra practice sessions for people like me.  

Thanks to FA staff and instructors for all the efforts put into perfecting the courses and the devotion to increasing the resilience of society.”

Links:

• Advanced Bleed Control training at local temple
• TECC training for police
• Basic Training at elementary school