Total logbook
Total Logbook: around 400 critical care taskings, from when I started logging as a BASICS doctor.
About the Author
About Me
My name is Dr Faraaz de Belder and I have been involved with prehospital and retrieval medicine since I was at medical school. I guess a question most people have is: ‘why should I listen to you?‘. Well, to be honest - it’s probably wise you don’t take everything I have to say with a grain of salt. Do your own research and validate what I have written. Hopefully, the following will help you
Prehospital and Retrieval Medicine career
Early days
I started off as a third-year medical student doing first aid for St John Ambulance in the UK. My first taste of ambulance-service work was a few observer shifts with a frontline crew in the East of England. It was a great experience for me and I loved the work.
After I became a doctor in 2012, I worked for various private medical companies doing crowd doctoring. The next rung up the ladder was doing motorsports medicine cover - being exposed to major trauma and working at active scenes was a valuable experience.
Getting more serious
When I was trying to get my foot in the door of the world of prehospital medicine, it was quite a competitive process with a lot of ‘proving your worth’. I now appreciate the training I received and the graded experience - literally starting with carrying paramedic’s bags!
By this stage, I had done the BASICS UK PHEC course as well as obligatory ALS/APLS courses. I managed to persuade the local GP training scheme to give me a hybrid program where they paid for me to spend a day in anaesthetics per fortnight and three months worth of responding with a critical care paramedic on the road.
This was an invaluable experience and I am forever indebted to my friend, Carl Keeble OAM, for helping me with this. I saw all of the ‘hard medicine’: cardiac arrests, major trauma entrapments, hangings etc whilst learning all of the ‘soft medicine’ - scene safety, radio communications, how the infrastructure of prehospital medicine worked.
I also sat and passed the Diploma in Immediate Medical Care at this stage. I also completed a high-speed driving course run by a police driving instructor. I attended the excellent ATACC course.
The real deal
In 2017, I got to what I still consider the pinnacle of my prehospital medicine career: volunteering as a BASICS doctor with the East Midlands Immediate Care scheme. This is a group of talented and dedicated doctors who volunteer their time to responding to the highest-graded emergency calls to support the paramedics of the East Midlands Ambulance Service - one of the UK’s statutory ambulance services.
Over the next two years, I responded from home to around 200 high-grade calls. It was a fantastic experience and I really honed my skills working independently at some very serious incidents. I worked with fire & rescue, police, coastguard and the many air ambulances around the county.
Getting my wings
I then moved to Australia in 2019 and spent a very enjoyable two years with Lifeflight Retrieval Medicine. I completed the exciting training program and helicopter underwater escape training. I worked for a year full-time and then a year part-time on the Bell 412 and Augusta-Westland 139 helicopters. I also did some long-range retrievals on their jets.
I sat and passed the Diploma in Prehospital and Retrieval Medicine and gained my specialist credentialing in prehospital and retrieval medicine in Queensland during this time.
I continue to work as a medical officer with the Royal Flying Doctors, QLD division whilst I complete my anaesthetics training.
Other qualifications
I’m a specialist general practitioner and GP anaethetist. I am an Advanced Trainee in the specialist anaesthesia training program.
I have Fellowship of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, Membership by examination of the Royal College of Anaesthetists and the Royal College of General Practitioners. I have Diplomas by examination in Prehospital and Retrieval Medicine, Immediate Medical Care, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Geriatric Medicine and Tropical Medicine & Hygiene.
Goals for the future
I aim to apply for a certificate of eligibility to sit the UK Fellowship in Immediate Medical Care and hopefully complete that by 2027. This website will help me study!