On September 20th, the club held a medical clinic for club members. A huge thank you to Don Graham for doing all of the work to make this happen and to Eric Peterson for teaching the class. Here's Don's report back on how the class went:

"In Sonoma County most of the time it will be 15 minutes before emergency medical help will be able to get to an accident scene. After this intensive 6 hour class, some of our club members are better prepared to help care for a fellow rider with an urgent medical situation, including what is involved in managing a scene and caring for the affected person.

This is the third first Aid class I have organized for the club it was by far the best as far as content and reception by participants.  The two previous classes were held on a weekday evening for about three hours. Club member Eric Peterson, who has taught these classes, suggested we expand this year to a 6 hour format, to cover the subject in more depth.

While the class went from 8am to 3pm, Eric is such an engaging presenter the time went by quickly.  After spending the morning in the classroom, in the afternoon we broke up into small groups and acted out injury scenes that Eric had written out. After the lecture we thought we knew the material, but the hands-on practice helped us to see where we might forget important steps. The hands-on enactment really drills it home but it does take more time, and the longer time commitment of the class may explain why we had fewer participants than in years past.

Participants, including two medical doctors, were extremely happy with the content."

And here's some feedback we heard from a participant:

"My husband and I attended Eric's training on Saturday and have not stopped talking about the experience. We have made up situations or relived actual events and then asked "what would you do?" I found this training invaluable and very pertinent to our daily lives. Eric expertly took the class through real life emergency situations and taught us how to react and how to potentially save a life. I really liked that he geared his presentation towards 'gear heads' and shared with us events that we all could identify with. I would strongly recommend this training to everyone in the club as one never knows what will happen when and what to do when it does happen! Eric's class was fun, highly informative and suitable for everyone in and out of the biking community."