Free emergency medical quizzes

February 14, 2024 4:17 PM

What signs suggest a soft tissue infection? If your friend falls during an outdoors adventure, what's the correct treatment for an open fracture? Check out a 303-question free wilderness medicine quiz, and a 536-question EMS, EMT, and paramedic quiz. Free to play in browser, no login needed. You can modify the difficulty of questions you're given, in topics including anatomy, initial patient assessment, pediatrics, conditions caused by illness and trauma, and more. Some questions are about field-specific mnemonics or terms like MOI, AVPU, or OPQRST, but they're still informative. (Via NOLS, home of NOLS Wilderness Medicine.)
posted by brainwane (13 comments total)

Rad. I had my WFR some time ago, had been looking for this.
posted by eustatic at 5:20 PM on February 14 [2 favorites]

Just had a ton of fun learning things by getting these wrong over and over
posted by dbx at 6:59 PM on February 14 [7 favorites]

"This post makes me uncomfortable..."
posted by Windopaene at 7:21 PM on February 14

I’m at 42% on the EMS test but I also don’t know if I want to keep going on the other 300 questions because I am lazy…
posted by corb at 7:41 PM on February 14

I scored 70 with a few misclicks but I'm betting a good chunk of that is down to reading how the test works.
posted by Ferreous at 8:09 PM on February 14

Wfr 233 of 303 (77%). Not bad, my training was 25 years ago. A few I definitely missed because the protocol changed.
posted by j_curiouser at 8:35 PM on February 14

I'm 100 questions on the wilderness one and I'm averaging 75% which I think is pretty good for someone with no formal training but a ton of exposure to medical stuff.
posted by AlexiaSky at 9:28 PM on February 14 [2 favorites]

This is great, and NOLS is a pretty wonderful organization.
posted by Pantengliopoli at 7:46 AM on February 15 [4 favorites]

So glad to share!

I'm thinking of going for Wilderness First Responder training in the next few years. I welcome thoughts from any of you who've done it.
posted by brainwane at 8:24 AM on February 15 [1 favorite]

I did a WFR course in 2006 as part of a NOLS semester; I re-upped a few times but eventually got sick of spending $200 and a weekend every other year to keep it current.

NOLS and WMI are awesome.

However, I found the classroom portions to be pretty excruciatingly boring -- it felt like being back in high school. While the info they were presenting was important and I'm glad to know it, it was not nearly as in depth as I wanted. (Not the instructor's fault! I'm pretty far outside their typical audience in terms of extreme nerdiness and background in STEM.) Where the course really shone was the scenarios -- they were excellently designed to be memorable and to get you comfortable with the hands-on aspects of wilderness care.

I just checked, and they now offer a hybrid option, and I'd personally opt for that one. I got nothing out of sitting in the classroom that I wouldn't have gotten from a textbook, even though I was impressed with the instructors' classroom skills.

Whether I'd recommend the course depends on what you want to get out of it. I've led a few ~week backcountry long trips since then, and thankfully haven't had to use any of the dramatic things we learned. It has been valuable in terms of thinking about risk/prevention, and in knowing a set of rules for evaluating whether something is an evac NOW / evac soon / treat in the field problem.
posted by Metasyntactic at 5:17 PM on February 15 [3 favorites]

When I can't sleep, one of the ways I quiet my chattering mind is to run through the patient assessment routine I learned in a NOLS WFA class. One: I'm number one. Two: What happened to you? Three: None on me. Four: any more? Five: zzzzzzzz
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:25 PM on February 15

Metasyntactic, thank you for the report! I also think the hybrid option might be better for me -- textbook-type classroom material online, and then in-person simulations and scenarios to hone my skills. It's a good question, what I'd want to get out of it. I want to be more capable of helping myself and others, in wilderness settings but also elsewhere, when dire situations emerge -- medical stuff but also other kinds of unpleasant surprises. So it feels useful to get some practice and a framework so I can recover my calm and be useful and practical in case of an emergency. And I'm just curious, too, and find human bodies to be super interesting collections of systems. I like knowing stuff!

The corpse in the library, I have learned that #5 in the scene size-up USED to be "Dead or alive?"

Get a general impression of the patient and the seriousness of their condition. To you, do they seem very sick/very hurt, not sick/not seriously hurt, or somewhere in between?

but, of course, rescuers sometimes murmur these mnemonics as we work through them, and a patient doesn't love being approached by a stranger whispering "Dead or alive?" And thus a recent NOLS curriculum update has us instead asking: "Five: What's the vibe?" My spouse objects on the grounds that this does not properly rhyme, and suggests instead: "Five: Dig that jive."

Also, because of a question in the EMS quiz, I was looking up a particular sign of cardiovascular issues, and came across English Wikipedia's informative "Cardiovascular system symptoms and signs" box (that's available, for instance, at the bottom of the Tachycardia article). So many great band names in there, like Cardarelli's Sign, Austin Flint Murmur, and Janeway Lesion. And then there's "Beck's triad", which, as my spouse pointed out, is two turntables and a microphone.
posted by brainwane at 9:56 AM on February 16 [1 favorite]

> I have learned that #5 in the scene size-up USED to be "Dead or alive?"

Huh, that actually makes more sense than "What's the vibe?"
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:04 PM on February 16