Acadia Mountain Guides Climbing School is partnering with Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center to offer a new mountain medicine program.
The program is the first of its kind on the East Coast, and will include courses on wilderness rescue, mountain skills and emergency medicine.
The goal is to bring medical and rescue skills into one program, said Acadia Mountain Guides owner Jon Tierney. A mountain guide, nurse and paramedic, Tierney has seen firsthand how rescue situations affect care.
"That's one of the beauties of I think combining the rescue component with the medicine, because people don't often combine those in training," he said. "They train for medicine and they train for rescue. This puts these two things together."
The program could be helpful for a range of professionals including doctors, paramedics, outdoor guides and safety directors at outdoor organizations, he said. For medical practitioners in particular, Tierney said it's about getting experience in unstable settings outside a hospital.
"Where you don't have a team of resources that you can call on, you don't have a respiratory therapist that can take care of the airway, you don't have nurses that can push meds, you know, things like that," Tierney said. "You have kind of got to do all this. You've got to think through what's most important. But meanwhile, it's snowing and the wind's blowing."
The program will require more than 200 hours of instruction and will include hands-on experience on mountains in Maine and New Hampshire. Applications for the program open in October.
