Action medical: Organization and operations

Facilitator: Greg
Time: 15 mins; 2120-2135
Actual time:
Learning Objectives:
Materials: Butcher paper for Contacting *CAM, listservs, wiki.

Street medic skills in context

Bullet-point skills learned today

  • Run with a buddy, spread calm, make scenes safer, wear gloves.

  • Introduce self.

  • Get informed consent for every step of every exam or intervention.

  • Be confident but not cocky.

  • Don't make promises you can't keep (like "Everything will be okay"). Better options are things like "I'm here, we're going to deal with this together."

  • Ask bystanders for information.

  • Support people, don't rescue them.

  • Be conscious of your tone of voice, body language, eye contact, how you're perceived.

Tomorrow and Friday this training is focused on first aid and health promotion skills

You will practice emergency response, first aid, community health work, and working in unsafe scenes.

Tonight we're practicing what is arguably more important:

how you approach this work.

Medics in mass mobilizations and catastrophic disasters

How medics approach a large-scale medic mobilization

like the 2008 DNC in Denver or the NATO summit last year in Chicago or Hurricane Sandy relief.

  • Mobilization -- medics from collectives and affinity groups across the country work together to organize and provide care.

  • Communications -- listservs, celly, phone trees, websites, social media.

  • Gear/Supply chain -- gear swaps, group orders.

  • Preparation -- housing, wellness center, fundraising, supply orders, planned meetings.

Roles you can play as a medic in the street

  • Affinity group medic.

  • Unmarked street medic.

  • Marked street medic.

Roles organizing and building medic support structures

  • Sites: medic housing, hang-out-space, sexual assault safehouses, wellness center.

  • Stuff: fundraising, food, supplies.

  • Legal support.

  • Comms/dispatch.

Roles in wellness center

  • Welcome.

  • Triage.

  • Security.

  • Assistant.

  • Caregiver.

Medics in the everyday struggle

Plugging in to ongoing action medical work

  • Ongoing and upcoming actions.

  • Local collectives around the world.

  • Listservs and medic wiki.

  • Starting your own medic affinity group.

We go beyond the streets

Street medics, promotoras de salud, community herbalists, and health activists as movements/in movements.

  • DIY health.

  • Health care activism.

  • Direct care: community health work and disaster response.