Foundations of Prehospital Trauma Care

Study guide

The biggest topic in FREC 3, and the most scenario-driven. It is built around a single habit: read the mechanism first. A large share of the questions describe an incident and ask what to anticipate, and answering from the visible injury rather than from the mechanism is how candidates go wrong.

Mechanism of injury, assessment and blood loss

What the incident tells you, and what to do about catastrophic bleeding when it is telling you something bad.

• Mechanism of injury predicts the injuries you have not found yet. Questions describe a fall, a collision or a crush and ask what you should be looking for.
• Life-threatening external bleeding is managed before the rest of the primary assessment, and the escalation between methods of control has an order.
• Estimating blood loss by eye is unreliable, and the bank cites the evidence that it is. Expect questions where the correct answer is that the estimate cannot be trusted.

Chest injuries, wounds and bleeding

Recognition first, then management. Chest injuries are assessed on what the signs mean, not on naming the injury.

• Penetrating and blunt chest injuries present differently and are managed differently; the questions describe a presentation and expect you to work back.
• Wound types are distinguished by what caused them and what that implies for contamination, bleeding and healing.
• Dressings and the decision to escalate are examined together: knowing what to apply is half the answer, knowing when it has stopped working is the other half.

Shock, burns and poisoning

Three separate outcomes folded into one block, each recognised by its own pattern.

• Shock is recognised as a progression rather than a single set of signs, and early recognition is what the questions actually test.
• Burns are assessed on severity and on the immediate care that follows, with the layers of the skin doing the explanatory work — another reason to revise the anatomy topic alongside.
• Poisoning is examined by route of exposure, because the route determines almost everything you do next.

Spinal, head and musculoskeletal injury, and moving and handling

The block with the most equipment in it, and the most opportunity to make a patient worse.

• Head and spinal injury are recognised from mechanism and from changing signs over time, so questions often give you two sets of observations rather than one.
• Immobilisation and extrication decisions are judged on necessity as much as technique — moving a patient who did not need moving is a wrong answer.
• Manual handling is assessed as a risk assessment, and assisting a clinician has defined limits that come back to scope of practice.

In the exam Work backwards from mechanism. If a scenario spends a sentence describing how the incident happened, that sentence is load-bearing and at least one distractor is designed for someone who skipped it. Note also that this component is where the app deliberately carries NO eye-injury question — the source corpus could not support one, so revise that criterion from your own course material.