Course Overview
In hands-on modules, you will learn how to reach, stabilize, and extricate trapped victims, with a special focus on patient care during extrication.
The 8-hour course trains you in how to use hand tools and items found on the scene or carried on an ambulance or first responder unit, instead of hydraulics. In addition to techniques for traditional vehicles, we have expanded the scope to include hybrid vehicles, trucks, buses, and small aircraft.
Course ContentThe course manual is the 2nd edition Access: First On Scene – Rapid Vehicle Entry text.
Course length: 8 hours
Didactic and Skills
- The Tools to Do the Job
- Size-Up
- Call for Help and Set-Up
- Vehicle Stabilization
- Accessing
- Stabilizing the Victim
- Disentanglement
- Packaging and Transfer
ITLS Access courses use actual wrecked cars for students to practice skills for stabilization and extrication hands-on. A majority of the course content is focused on practical skills.
Among the procedures taught are:
- Disarming the supplemental restraint system
- Stabilizing a vehicle on its wheels, on its roof, on its side, and temporarily with improvised materials
- Opening a door from a hinge or bolt mechanism
- Removing a roof from back to front
- Dropping a roof from a vehicle on its side
- Removing the floor assembly from a vehicle
- Moving the steering column/wheel
- Moving the dash/front end
- Dropping the sides of a wrecked vehicle
- Lifting a vehicle off a patient trapped underneath
- Packaging the patient for removal, using a long spine board and straps or rope sling
- And more!