Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the night of June.

One of the most intriguing assignments I've enjoyed while at the Independent was a course on advanced medicine for remote foreign travel.

This was back in the 1990s, but I remember it well. The idea is simply that all kinds of

issues from fractured bones to stomach problems that would be quite easily managed if you were

in a modern location with plenty of good medical care, but which, if you're in the mountains,

in the desert, in the jungle, provide all kinds of problems. And the idea that non-specialists

can be taught, basic procedures for helping to manage casualties, has been picked up in the 21st century by

Lloyd Figgins of travel risk and incident prevention. He's been telling me about the course.

Think about remote wilderness medicine. So often we go to environments where there are

medical facilities nearby, there's a good ambulance service, but when we get a little bit further

off the beaten track, where we're talking about some of the more remote locations that we want to go,

we want to go and explore, but you're not going to have the medical services that are

going to be at hand. An ambulance is not going to arrive in 11 minutes. It might not arrive in 11 hours.

So therefore, this course has been developed specifically with doctors, with paramedics,

in order to provide pre-hospital care in a remote environment until the cavalry can come over the hill.

So it equips people with the skills of first aid, but it takes it that little bit further about how to protect a casualty,

either from the elements, and actually treat them in that first instance until professionals can arrive.

A bit like a sort of first aid course with some attitude.

You could call it that.

And when we designed it specifically to make sure that everything in medicine is about

handover.

So even if you were to fall sick in your hometown in the UK, the first people who might

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