What is the Diver Medic Technician Training Program?
Diver Medic Technician Training Programs are designed to help save the lives of commercial divers who are injured while working on off-shore locations such as oil rigs, archaeological points of interest and oceanographic sites. These sites often are located hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital or emergency room and are accessible only by boat or helicopter. If a person is injured at these sites, transportation to a hospital or emergency room could take hours; however, life-threatening injuries often require treatment within the hour. In such situations, seriously injured people often would die without the immediate medical intervention provided by diver medic technicians.
What do the programs do?
These training programs are certified to train diver medic technicians. It teaches the kind of medical procedures used by emergency room and other physicians to revive patients and save lives. These techniques include advanced resuscitation and cardiac techniques that open blocked airways, relieve life-endangering buildup of pressure in the chest cavity and lungs, replace lost body fluids and blood, and close open wounds.
These programs also teach diver medic technicians how the body responds physiologically to varying underwater pressures. That knowledge is used in two ways. First, it allows diver medic technicians to treat diving-related injuries such as decompression sickness—a possibly life-threatening condition that occurs when divers surface from the depths of the ocean too quickly. Second, knowing how the body responds to changing pressure allows diver medic technologists to bring injured divers to the water surface safely and treat their injuries until they can be evacuated.
Why are these programs important?
Commercial divers, who perform such tasks as conducting underwater research, capping off-shore oil and gas wells, fixing or laying pipeline, and splicing or repairing telecommunications cables that lie on the ocean floor, routinely work at depths of 150 to 300 feet, often stay under water for up to 30 days, and may even dive up to 1200 feet. In responding to emergencies such as broken pipelines, they are often required to work under extreme weather conditions, and they often work with heavy equipment that can lead to grave injury in case of an accident. If injured under water, these divers must be brought to the surface using high-tech pressurized chambers, a process that can take hours. To protect these workers and ensure their prompt treatment in case of a medical emergency, both the United States Coast Guard and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration require that diver medic technologists are present at all employer-sponsored dives.
Who oversees the training programs?
In order to become a certified diver medic technician, students must take and pass exams given by the National Board of Diving and Hyperbaric Medical Technology. This board sets the curriculum for all diver medic training programs that it has accredited. The course curriculum is also developed with input from the American College of Hyperbaric Medicine (ACHM), a professional society representing about 300 U.S. physicians who practice hyperbaric or pressurized, medicine, and by the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society (UHMS), an international, non-profit organization whose purpose is to protect the health of sport and commercial divers. UHMS has more than 2,000 members from more than 60 countries.
Who can take the course?
Students enrolled in the course must have emergency medical training and be certified divers.
Animals may be used to teach emergency medical procedures in some of the courses
A diver medic technician training course may use animals to teach advanced trauma and resuscitation techniques because cadavers, inflatable dolls and other alternative methods of teaching these techniques cannot duplicate the physiological changes that accompany serious trauma and its treatment. The animals are anesthetized during teaching sessions so they don’t feel pain, as a person undergoing the same life-saving techniques might. Using live animals to teach these techniques is widely accepted to be the best way to teach students how to observe, assess and treat traumatic injury, and thereby prevent human death. The use of animals in the diver medic training programs has been reviewed, critically screened and approved in accordance with university, state, and federal rules governing the humane care, husbandry and handling of animals. Those rules include guidelines set by the federal Animal Welfare Act, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the National Institutes of Health. In addition, this training has been accredited by the Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC), an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to assuring the scientific and lay public that laboratory animals will be used humanely and that there is compliance with all applicable laws. AAALAC only accredits institutions which achieve gold standards of ethical animal care.
For more information on Diver Medic Technician programs:
National Board of Diving and Hyperbaric Medical Technology
Main office: (504) 328-8871 (Harvey, LA)
Paul Baker, President: (210) 215-8660
