Auto-x Challenge

[Rainman]

Just wondering if any of you guys/gals compete in the TERC auto extrication challenges. I am currently on a team and we won the regionals for our district last year. So far our team has registered for the regionals, centrals and waiting to hear where the nationals will be held.

[firefighter26]

I have competed three years now (1 under CARS, 2 under TERC)..... We've done pretty good for our province.

One thing that I never liked was how some scenarios are obviously more difficult than others (at least in my opinion); and I found their to be to much politics involved some times, which really brings down the entire experience.

We plan on entering again this year, but we have to fill a number of gaps in our team and start to rebuild, but that shouldn't be to hard as there are a lot of people interested in joining the team.

[hmckay91]

firefighter26

Keep up the good work and attending challenges. I began competing in 1991 and began Assessing (judging) in 1998 and have seen hundreds of scenarios (and set up a few in my time).

Sceanrio design is an art not a science and depends on many factors outside the control of the designer which must be managed. Those factors include the number, type and condition of vehicles themselves, the size of patients, the equipment available for crushing (and moving), and the SKILL of the operators. You just can't order "Two vehicle MVC, T-Bone, patient trapped" and give me a difficulty 6 today.

The objective is to present various scenarios of a roughly equal difficulty to CHALLENGE the partisipants. The nominal goal is a 25 minute controlled release scenario. If all the challenge teams had to do was stabilise a car on four wheels and pop a door, I think the teams would feel cheated and the learning value would suffer.

The challenge of a scenario designer is to manage all those factors to come up with a good baseline. Cars get overcrushed undercrushed and change when being set up. Some cars are in good shape and some are rust piles. Sometimes the patients just can't get where we need them to be. Sometimes an "easier" scenario is complicated by interior entrapment that is not obvious to the audience although must be address to be sucsessful.

Unfortuntly, perception creeps in as you note. Sometimes scenarios LOOK more technically difficult but are easier while others look easy but are more technically difficult and sometimes frankly mistakes get made.

You are heavily evaluated on how well you perform (Command and Control, Patient Care, Safety, and Technique) not just whether you get the patient out or not. A team that gets a perceived "easier" or "harder" scenario does not get an advantage.

As a partisipant it is more difficut to judge the difficulty from an arms length perspective. The scenario designer does their best and the Assessors (judges) act as a sanity check to see if the difficulty has deviated from the baseline set for the challenge (or pit).

I hope you continue to invest in these Auto X challenges as learning oppotunities, share the knowledge with your peers, and bring it back to better care for your "customers" on the street.

[firedog7]

Well said hugh!!!