WMT’s History
WMT has a proud history stretching back to 1991 when we ran our first course in Bangor, North Wales. Here’s how our business and contribution to expedition medical education for laypeople and medics has evolved:
In 1988, WMT’s Directors Barry Roberts and Dr Jon Dallimore met on Mount Kenya when working with Operational Raleigh. Barry had a strong interest in field medicine and Jon nurtured this. They became friends and later, business partners.
Barry moved from Canada to the UK in 1989 to take a position with GEC’s management college Dunchurch, where he supervised 5 major overseas expeditions for young employees. In 1990 Jon accompanied Barry to Nepal where they conducted glacio-chemical research. En route to Kala Patar near Everest base camp on an acclimatisation trek – and between practicing history taking – they hit on the idea of packaging what Jon had been teaching Barry into a course. Using the then bible of wilderness medicine, the American Medicine for Mountaineering textbook as a template, they sketched out the 5-day Advanced Medicine for Remote Foreign Travel course, dubbed AMRFT. This rather long winded name (now 4 days and called simply Advanced Medicine) reflected the very focused nature of this course. The course was ground breaking in teaching invasive skills and about prescription drugs to laypeople. Right from the beginning our students practiced giving injections and intravenous canulation on each other. How can you practice these techniques in anger if you’ve only ever mutilated an orange?!
After joining Raleigh full time for a short stint as a Director in ’93-’94, Barry left the secure world of regular paid employment to work as an independent management consultant and to devote more time to developing WMT.
Jon joined fledgling World Challenge Expeditions as their Medical Consultant (Ops Director Clive Barrow was another Kenya OR colleague). We pared down the advanced course into a 3-day syllabus, called it Far From Help and piloted this new course for World Challenge in 1995. The invasive training was eliminated but we retained the teaching about prescription drugs.
In 1998 Mrs Shane Winser invited WMT to run Far From Help at the Royal Geographical Society. Although she may have been initially skeptical about the reach of our syllabus, Mrs Winser became a great friend of WMT. Jon continues to work with Shane on the RGS Medical Cell. Far From Help continues to be hosted by the RGS/IBG once a year. In 2008 we pared FFH down to two days duration.
Encouraged by demand from doctors, WMT partnered with the RGS to run a well attended one-day seminar on expedition medicine in 1999. In addition to medical lectures, we invited many organisations that recruit doctors (Raleigh, MSF etc.) to pitch to the audience. This was the beginning of our Medic series of courses aimed at doctors. We followed this up with a more extensive course simply called Expedition Medicine for medics held in Chamonix in January 2000. We’ve run this sell out course annually ever since. In June 2004 we introduced a summer version of the winter course and called this Expedition Medicine & Field Skills for Diverse Environments (we’ve recently dropped the Diverse Environments tag – long course titles are not SEO friendly!). In 2006 we went further afield and launched the annual Morocco Mountain Medicine Expedition. We responded to demand for shorter UK based courses held over weekend by introducing Jungle Medicine in 2008 and then Mountain Medicine in 2009.
In spring 2009 we partnered with the prestigious Glenmore Lodge, the Scottish national mountain training centre, to run Far From Help, now an annual event. In 2011 the Lodge will host Advanced Medicine.
WMT’s private course bespoke work forms an important part of our portfolio. Our most exotic assignment was travelling to Singapore in 2000 to deliver Far From Help to 25 teachers at United World College. Since then we’ve worked with media star Bruce Parry and his Tribe film team, other BBC teams, Skip Novak’s Antarctic sailing crew and many other worthy organisations, businesses and inspiring people (see the Bespoke tab).
We took the concept of hybrid training (combining medicine with other relevant expedition skills) to an new level in 2006 with the introduction of a 7-day Expedition Skills course with partners Land Rover Experience and Woodsmoke, which combines Far From Help (or for doctors on the course, the parallel Expedition Medic 2-day module) with clever bushcraft training, off-road driving and bush mechanic training.
In 2009 the landmark Oxford Handbook of Expedition and Wilderness Medicine was published by OUP, which was co-edited by Jon Dallimore with chapter contributions by 10 other WMT instructors including three by Barry Roberts.
The name and phrase wilderness medical training was legally trademarked by WMT in 2008. We rebranded in late 2009 and graphic artist Lucy Gallagher, incorporating the initials WMT, maintained the heritage of our original green coloured leaf-styled logo with an updated fiery orange version which represents the natural world and also alludes to blood vessels. Our footer image (the human WMT letters) was adapted from a photo associate Dr Nick Mason took of our 2009 summer Chamonix course students against the setting sun. Riley of Fired Up Design led our new website development team which went live in December 2010.
Notably absent from this brief history is any mention of our important associate instructors, all of whom have developed their expertise and CVs in impressive ways over the time we have known them – some for more than a dozen years. All of them deserve credit for building the WMT brand and the expert reputation we have.
We look forward to running more courses than ever in 2011 including a special anniversary event to mark our 20th year. See the Special Events tab.
