Why Backcountry Medical Training?

Colorado Air National Guard CH-47 Chinook Helicopter Evacuation from Longs Peak CO

For over twenty years, Backcountry Medical Training and our sister company CPR Seattle have been providing the highest quality emergency medicine classes for individuals and businesses in the Pacific Northwest, including urban first aid and CPR, Wilderness First Aid (WFA), Wilderness First Responder (WFR), as well as Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) for medical professionals.  

Why should you choose Backcountry Medical Training for your training needs?  We believe that three core elements differentiate a training provider:

  • Instructors
  • Curriculum
  • Customer Service

BMT has fabulous instructors, an intentionally designed curriculum, and a top-notch, organized, administrative team that prides itself on customer service.  This combination delivers superb education to our students, as you can see from thousands of five-star reviews under the CPR Seattle brand, as well as our five-star reviews under the new brand .

Our Instructors

Sig Sauer 5.12 climb in Indian Creek Utah

There are many people with a deep understanding of medicine and how to practice it in the backcountry. But someone can have all the knowledge in the world without the teaching skills to deliver the material in a way that makes sense to students.  Every instructor at Backcountry Medical Training is an outstanding educator who is passionate about teaching and has deep real world experience in wilderness, remote, and austere medicine.  

What makes an outstanding educator? Good question!  We hire, train, and expect our instructors to meet the following educational standards:

  • Engaging: Our instructors are adept at engaging with students to deliver lectures, stories, demonstrations, and practice scenarios in a captivating manner.
  • Ability to Connect: Our instructors are comfortable connecting with students and gauging student understanding of course material.
  • Flexible: We adjust course material and style to provide the best learning for students in multiple formats.  Some students have a wealth of knowledge regarding wilderness medicine, and some are new learners, and we often have both in the same class!  We have the skills and experience to reach and teach both.   
  • Organized: We prize the ability to deliver information in a logical and sequential manner. This is key! Students will not retain information if they cannot organize it in their minds.

In addition to being excellent educators, our instructors have the medical background and wilderness experience you would want from your partner or rescuer if injured in the backcountry.  Here is what you can expect from our lead instructors:

  • Advanced Medical Training: WFR, WEMT/REMT, Paramedic, Nurse, PA, or Doctor
  • Hands-on Patient Experience in both recreational and professional settings
  • Outdoor Leadership Experience: Guiding high risk activities and/or multi-day trips, ski patrol, or search and rescue (SAR) experience
  • Extensive Personal Wilderness Experience: our instructors do extensive hiking, backpacking, climbing, mountaineering, skiing, paddling, sailing, paragliding, SCUBA diving, and more.

Our Curriculum

Our students tell us over and over that we have the best wilderness medicine curriculum in the industry.  All Backcountry Medical Training courses follow the Wilderness Medicine Education Collaborative standards for certification courses and feature hands-on instruction and in-person real-time validation of skills.  This means that when you earn certification with Backcountry Medical Training, your certification will be recognized and open to recertification across the wilderness and remote medicine industry. 

While the basic content of wilderness medicine classes is relatively standard the various organizations offering these courses, the presentation and organization of the material differs significantly.  Over thousands of teaching hours, collective input, meetings, and brainstorm sessions, we have tweaked, massaged, chopped, added, refined, and rewritten our curriculum with the goals of:

  • Maximizing student retention
  • Maximizing practice time
  • Minimizing distracting extraneous information 

The end result is that our classes are presented in a logical sequential order, using visual aids, instructor demonstrations, practice scenarios, handouts, and lectures. 

All medicine is dynamic and as such our curriculum isn’t just well designed, it is built on the most up-to-date best practices for wilderness medicine.  We draw heavily from the latest research, position papers, clinical practice guidelines from the Wilderness Medical Society (link), as well as the hands-on experience our staff gain every day doing medicine in remote places.  You’ll be learning from the people who would guide you into the wilderness, rescue you when injured, keep you alive in the ambulance, and care for you in the hospital.  We don’t just teach textbook medicine, but rather what really works when things go wrong in far-flung places.  

We are so proud of our curriculum that we are in the process hiring a medical director with the goal of offering continuing education credits for classes certified by the Commission on Accreditation for Pre-Hospital Continuing Education (CAPCE).

Our Customer Service

The logistics of organizing a wilderness medicine course are significant.  When you enroll in a class through Backcountry Medical Training, the process will be smooth.  Our administration team excel at handing the little details to make things easy on you.  We have been organizing and teaching classes since 2005 under the umbrella of CPR Seattle.  Backcountry Medical Training benefits from all the proprietary software, and dedicated, organized staff that has made CPR Seattle a beloved community institution with thousands upon thousands of capable and certified students. 

When you sign up for an individual class or schedule a custom/private course for your school, group, or workplace, you will have a dedicated point of contact available anytime to handle administrative questions on Monday through Friday from 8:30am until 5pm PST.  For private classes, you’ll also be in touch with the lead instructor for your course, who will help customize the training to meet the specific needs of your group.

The Bottom Line

At Backcountry Medical Training, you will learn and remember the most important, up-to-date wilderness medicine skills from outstanding instructors, and your experience will be smooth and easy.  We can’t wait to see you in class.  Sign up today!