The street is dark as me and my trainee medic buddy burst through the door into a torrent of noise. The scene is one of total chaos, with a nearby woman nearly covering me in projectile vomit as I survey the scene.

A little way down the street is a man lying on the floor, his head covered in blood. A second person, clearly disorientated, is staggering around. In the distance, the police are closing in and I’ve not got enough supplies to deal with this.

‘D for danger, take time to look around…’ I mutter to myself, trying not to panic. After a few seconds pause which seem like a lifetime to see if there’s anything around which might get us hurt, I and my buddy decide to go for the person bleeding on the floor…
It’s a good thing that these involved and intensive scenarios are an integral part of the three-day Action Medics training course, where you play both patients and medics as part of the education process.

Having confidently cruised through the first round of talking, and thinking ‘yeah I can handle an injured person’, my first patient ‘died’ while I was dealing (badly) with some otherwise harmless drunks. It wasn’t until my third attempt that I really started to get things right, by which time if I’d been in the field it would have been a disaster zone. My trainer, ‘M’, noted with a smile that it wouldn’t be a lesson we’d forget in real life.

The Action Medics were set up in April of 2005, shortly before the G8 in Stirling, to provide aid in what a lot of people thought were going to be extremely violent situations. As it turned out, their contribution was to be one of the biggest success stories of the entire affair, spawning a new support system at demonstrations and protests which has already proved its worth several times over.

At the G8 itself, medics spotted a major potential problem at the camps, which teemed with people and had little or no hygiene, when cases of vomiting sickness began to soar. The group sorted out everything from public health to patching up spikes in peoples’ feet, and even in one case the fallout from someone riding a shopping trolley off the roof of a building.

Following G8 the medics, who include several healthcare professionals, shifted gear, and have now trained up hundreds of people in a constantly evolving process. Once you have done their course, and learned CPR, you are counted as a member of the collective and you can go out on actions. They provide a kit list and training in a huge range of scenarios, and they do bulk ordering for equipment so you can get set up more cheaply.
There have been up to 20 trainings so far in Britain, Holland, the Ukraine and Russia. Born out of the experiences of long-term activists who have been involved with a variety of major convergences and campaigns, the training has some major differences from more traditional medic courses.

Thought is put into how to react in circumstances such as CS Gas attacks, mass arrests while police lines move forward, injuries taken while falling from fences, or from water cannon, right up to keeping watch for fascist attacks.
This last came to the fore during this year’s mobilisation for the Russian G8, when UK medics went out to train Ukrainians and Russians.

The Ukraine was chosen because it has easier access than Russia, and many of the medics they trained there were already well aware of some of the things being trained for, like the need to watch out for threats.

‘M’ said: “They are amazing, the girl who translated for us had recently had two people killed, one at a food not bombs and the other at a punk gig, and they needed medics. At the end of the training they made us promise to go to the G8 itself in Russia. We did 70 people in Russia and it was utterly different because of the police and fascists and it was entirely possible we would see stabbings. We ended up in a square just waiting for people to treat (go to medicstastebetter.blogspot.com for their diary of the events).”

Training session requests in the UK have tended to come under less spectacular circumstances since the G8 circus rolled on, but have kept the collective stretched - M had done three weekends in a month by the time she finished with us. Despite the high workload however, she feels the effort has been worth it, building up the people who go to them and sometimes providing extra medical support at the vital moment.

“Other than in the run up to G8 protests, training requests tend to come out of gatherings like Earth First!. The more we do the more we’re asked. I think we’re multipurpose. People end up getting riot training and it builds confidence. People start off and they are really shy but by the end they are much more assertive.”

“At Sack Parliament (a recent demonstration in London), there were people who had trained the day before! I went and for 120-150 people in the square there were about eight medics on the scene, which was great because the trainers don’t want to medic at every event.”

The medics’ role has however been more fluid than expected, with M repeatedly warning the group I was training with that ‘you end up being everyone’s mum – have they had some water, have they eaten recently, did they get pissed the night before…’ At events like the G8 summit, climate camps and Earth First!, medics ended up performing secondary duties of making sure the sometimes recalcitrant activists who showed up had some means of washing their hands after going to the loo, among other general health-keeping duties.

“We seem to have ended up doing a lot of first aid stuff at gatherings and that is something we will do if we are particularly committed to it but it has to be specifically political.” M added.

Organisation and legal issues have been a problem for the group. Because of the nature of their work, there are potential legal problems in gaining consent for what you do, and potentially if you get things wrong.

M explained: “Not every one (of the trainers) is necessarily a doctor or a nurse and we don’t certify our medics, particularly because there’s no framework for it. The State Department don’t give out advice on chemical weapons for example. So we aren’t registered with anyone. To go out and be an action medic you have to have been through the training but we are a loose affinity group.

“Legally there could be problems but it’s a massively grey area. On the continent they have Good Samaritan laws where you have to help people on the floor but we don’t have that here, but it hasn’t been a problem so far. It’s not likely that someone will bring charges if you save their life.”

“We are explicitly non-hierarchical, which is a problem because for the heath care professionals there is a huge clash between the professional culture of telling people what to do and a more consultative approach. In a medical emergency it’s all about experience though. But it’s very difficult not to end up with ‘leading’ figures.

“But how do we act as medics without centralising and how do we avoid imposing hierarchy? Very few people started the action medics group and now that more people have gotten involved we want to maintain openness and it’s really difficult to let people get on with it. If people fuck up it’s bad in a medical situation and arguably we are responsible for what people do under out training.”

These potential pitfalls have not stopped the medics from expanding extremely quickly, bolstered by a growing respect for the high level of training which is being provided. In my own case, I found a setup which is of a quality many professional courses would struggle to equal.

M thinks that the medic training is hugely worthwhile venture, and has been thrilled by the enthusiasm she has seen around the country. She said: “It’s very exciting. I’m constantly inspired by the people we train – we learn something new from each training.
“We decided that our main purpose is training people – as many as possible. We want al the activists in Britain to have that. It should be like getting the legal briefing. Not everyone is going to be wholly trained and there are people who will want to go on to do things like wilderness training and everything else but everyone should know the basics.
The Action Medics are currently considering the next G8 summit in Germany, which they believe will be a much more difficult event than was seen in the UK, where there isn’t an organised fascist force on the streets. Training is also planned for South America.

For more information or to organise a training meeting near you, go to actionmedics.org.uk

- Taken from Freedom, Anarchist News and Views -