During the course of your work you may occasionally find yourself operating in overtly or subversively hostile environments. Traditionally, we would believe that only a well-recognised handful of areas place foreign nationals at risk of injury or death, but in fact there are dozens of potentially dangerous countries and provinces throughout the World.

It seems that almost every day there are acts of violence perpetrated against innocent UK and foreign civilian employees working abroad. Where possible the risk is mitigated through means of ‘minders’, close protection teams or sometimes just through the individual relying on their own wits and experience.

An act of violence can erupt seemingly from nowhere with catastrophic consequences. At Speciality Oxygen we are only too aware of the number these incidents. Our instructors have attended murders and serious assaults against civilian employees around the globe. In these situations, a deliberate strike against you or your colleagues can result in injuries that can kill within minutes. When this happens, immediate and appropriate treatment can make the difference between life and death. That’s fine if you have a specially trained (and up to date) ‘medic’ who isn’t either too busy trying to extract from the ambush to help treat you or isn’t a casualty himself. But even when a ‘medic’ is part of the team, on occasion; the lack of specialist, relevant trauma training has led to potentially preventable deaths.

There are other far-reaching consequences – where does the duty of care of an employer or protection team stop with relation to the safety of its staff and clients? If the specialist training now exists for civilians to help mitigate the risk of unnecessary death or disability, does your employer fail in their legal duty of care by failing to train its staff appropriately?

At Speciality Oxygen we already provide training courses for high-risk civilian personnel and are working hard to ensure all of those requiring training have it available. But our caveat is that it must be taught by experts, people who have vast experience of actually dealing with these types of wounds rather than just training ‘from a textbook’. Lets be frank – minor wound management as taught on First Aid At Work courses does not equip you with either the knowledge or skills to deal with major trauma effectively. We should know – we teach first aid courses too! We are not a company who provides a so-called ‘total package’ of how to survive various types of attack, how to drive in convoy, or what to do if you are taken hostage, rather we are medical experts who have and continue to operate in the most hostile of environments. Our job is to save the lives of people who have suffered life-threatening trauma by training medics and delivering superb care at the scene of incidents we attend.  

Speciality Oxygen has developed the Specialist Major Trauma Management Course for professionals who are high risk of exposure to serious trauma. We regularly teach the military medics and doctors to deal with these types of injury but until now this level of training has not been available to civilians. In addition to the training we will be able to recommend or provide the small trauma packs to you and your organisation.

We cannot reduce the incidence of violent assaults but through our courses we can help to mitigate the consequences of such attacks on Freelance, Subcontract and Corporate employees.