Student represents UK in international first aid competition

A St Catharine’s student was the team manager for a group of first aiders selected by St John Ambulance (SJA) to represent the UK in a recent international competition. Emma Dinnage, a final-year Natural Sciences undergraduate, is a District Student Volunteering Lead and Advanced First Aider for SJA and travelled to the German city of Potsdam to compete earlier this month.

Founded in Germany in 1952, Die Johanniter organises an annual first aid competition for its different branches, who send the winners of regional heats to represent them each year. Die Johanniter and the SJA UK are both overseen by the international Order of St John.

Other teams are able to compete at the invitation of Die Johanniter so Emma’s team were pitted against seven teams from Die Johanniter, a team from Poland and the Potsdam Fire Service. Judged by trained paramedics, each team gained points by completing different tasks and a written test, which was written in German (hastily translated for the UK participants).

Emma explains, “SJA was delighted to be invited after we established a connection through Die Johanniter’s regional youth lead who was on an exchange in Cambridge last year. Our gracious hosts placed us in seventh place out of ten teams, with a trophy and €300 prize to bring home. We were super pleased given the quality of the other teams, our abysmal knowledge of German and inexperience carrying stretchers – one of the standard tasks in Germany that we’re not actually permitted to do in the UK.”

This year’s competition was attended by 3,500 competitors and supporters, and was held at Filmpark Babelsberg – the second oldest large-scale film studio in the world and site of ‘Metropolis’ by Fritz Lang and more recent blockbusters like ‘Captain America: Civil War’ and ‘The Matrix Resurrections’.

“The setting inspired many of the tasks set for the teams and ensured there was a ready supply of realistic special effects for wounds and blood loss. I particularly enjoyed the scenario based in a film set that looked like an American frontier town, where we got to explore the set and had to go looking for our three patients.”

SJA is hoping to return to the competition in two years’ time, by which point Emma will no longer be eligible to compete as she will be well into a graduate medicine course at the University of Cambridge. Emma is confident about the quality of first aiders in Cambridge that SJA could call upon in the future:

“The University’s First Aid Society is going from strength to strength. We were able to send a large group of volunteers to assist SJA at the London Marathon in April 2023, and we are gearing up to provide first aid at the busy run of May Week events that mark the end of the academic year in Cambridge.”