Professional Responder Skills Refresher in Calgary

People who have already been hired and have a recruit testing week coming. You did the certificate months or years ago, you have not run a full patient assessment since, and the part that worries you is not the knowledge but the hands.

It is also useful if you are returning to responder work after time away, or if you hold a current certificate and simply want a supervised day of practice without sitting another full course.

Dates are posted when a recruit group forms. If your testing week is not covered by a posted date, email us and we will build one around it, one to two weeks ahead of your week. Close enough that it is still in your hands on the day, far enough out that you can do something about whatever the day exposes.

It runs in Calgary or in Leduc, whichever suits the group that forms around your date. If your week is on the calendar, tell us now rather than later: a day gets built around the people who ask for it.

A full day, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with an hour for lunch. It runs in this order.

1. Written exam practice, so you can see where you stand before anything else.

2. Skills review.

3. Airway, oxygen and spinal.

4. Lunch, 12:30 to 1:30.

5. Patient scenarios.

6. Vital signs review.

7. A final written test, to see how far you've come since you walked in.

The two written tests are there so you can measure the day. The first shows where you stand when you arrive, and the last shows how far you've come by the end.

Before lunch the skills go back under your hands one at a time. After lunch the scenarios put them together with a partner, run the way a scenario is actually run, so scene assessment, primary and secondary survey, airway and breathing, oxygen, bleeding control and spinal considerations arrive attached to a patient instead of as a list.

Vital signs get their own review, timed, because that is the skill that comes apart first once somebody is standing there with a clock.

The emphasis is on doing rather than watching. You run the skills, you run them again, and you get corrected while you do, which is the difference between knowing a sequence and performing it under someone's eye.

This is a day shaped around the fire recruit process rather than around a syllabus, and that shape did not come from us guessing at it. Past students and instructors of ours who went on to be hired by Calgary Fire and Edmonton Fire helped decide what the day contains, based on what they were actually asked to do and on where they watched people come unstuck.

To be clear about what that is and is not: nobody at Delta has any part in anybody's assessment, and none of this is inside knowledge of a specific test. It is people who have stood where you are about to stand telling us what mattered. A fair part of what the day does is take the edge off, because what goes wrong in a testing week is usually not the knowledge. It is nerves meeting a skill nobody has run in a while.

Twelve students is the ceiling for the day. We aim for one instructor to every four of you, which is what makes it possible to correct somebody while they are working rather than afterwards from memory. The ratio on any given date depends on which instructors are free, so it is what we aim at rather than what we promise.

The registration form asks what you want to review, and that field is doing real work. The day is built around what the people in it say they need, so what you write there changes what happens.

"N/A", "I don't know" and "everything" are the three answers that help nobody, including you. Name the thing you fumbled last time, or the call you could not talk your way through, or the skill you have not touched since the certificate. The more specific you are, the better the day is for you and for everybody else in your cohort.

It is not a certification course and it does not renew a certificate. If your Red Cross certificate is about to expire, the course you want is a recertification, booked before the expiry date. If it has already expired, the course you want is the full course, not this.

It is not run with, for, or on behalf of any fire service, and nobody at Delta has any part in anybody's recruit assessment. What we can do is give you a day of hard practice on the skills those assessments draw from. What happens in your testing week is between you and your employer.