If at first you don't succeed ... Scandinavian Pre-Hospital Research Project Proposal

(Updated 11 February 2013)

Having always been a bit of a "Pollyanna" at heart, in early 2012 I embarked on my fourth Churchill Fellowship application (from the early 1990s to the current day) and received my fourth rejection letter. I was also rung by the Victorian Chairman to stress that there was nothing wrong with my application or excellent qualifications but it was merely that the Panel preferred other topics in the extremely competitive environment. This was very disappointing, not only for the time and effort on my own part and that of the referees, but also for the fact that it is extremely difficult to find funding for 'boutique' projects of this nature, which are cutting-edge in their own way but not part of mainstream health research and funding. I suggested to the Churchill Fellowship that perhaps they could do unsuccessful candidates the kindness of having a web page that directed them to other possible alternative sources of funding.

One other option was to apply for an Emergency Services Foundation Volunteer Scholarship. However, this required the endorsement of the head of your organisation, and it was stated to be a "recognised emergency services organisation", which raised issues of its own, as no volunteer search and rescue group or ski patrol in general is specifically recognised under the Emergency Management Manual Victoria. A volunteer with Alpine Search and Rescue has to go through Bush Search and Rescue and then to Victoria Police (as the recognised agency with responsibility for search and rescue). Bush Search and Rescue declined to endorse the project due to the ski patrol component. Ski patrol endorsement could have been obtained but difficulties were encountered through the scholarship secretariat in appreciating that the role of ski patrol was separate to that of search and rescue and thus obtaining a ruling as to whether ski patrol would be recognised as an emergency services organisation for the purposes of the scholarship application. In the end time ran out and I was told to wait until the next round of applications at the end of 2012 and to try again then. I had supplied two written references from both the search and rescue and ski patrol side, but these were deemed insufficient as according to the letter of the law an endorsement of the head of agency was required.

I was both despondent and disappointed with this outcome, as I had spent about a week putting the application together and been involved in extensive email correspondence and telephone conversations in trying to get the application accepted for consideration and the Foundation had publicly stated that they wanted to encourage more scholarship applications. Whether it was sufficiently meritorious to receive a scholarship is another matter but I would really have appreciated the opportunity to have it considered. It has all been so difficult I don't know if I will in fact try again unless the administrative issues are clearly resolved beforehand.

(Update)
With a change of personnel in the National Ski Patrol body, I was able to arrange endorsement of my (expanded) research project proposal and have submitted it as an application for the 2013 round of volunteer scholarships. This year I decided to go direct to Ski Patrol for endorsement as Ski Patrol has operational independence from Victoria Police.

This is a brief outline of the proposed project (the full proposal is available at: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/30234302/Pre-Hospital_Research_Project_Proposal_2013.pdf):

Scandinavian Pre-Hospital Search and Rescue and Ski Patrol Research Project Proposal
Location: Sweden, Norway and Iceland.
Purpose: Learning from and benchmarking international best practice in order to optimize domestic best practice.
Key topics to be examined:

• Alpine and wilderness models of (and equipment and facilities for) casualty care and interface between ski patrol, search and rescue, ambulance and medical services. 
• Content, layout and standardization between agencies of incident reporting forms for the accidents occurring in alpine and wilderness areas and the underlying ‘data set’ used for encoding and processing of this data. 
• Authorised use of medications by emergency responders in the treatment of casualties. 
• First Aid training for emergency responders – ski patrol and search and rescue. 
• Training in mass casualty triage principles for emergency responders – ski patrol and search and rescue. 
• Establishing the extent to which ski patrol and search and rescue organisations are formally recognised as part of the ‘Emergency Services’ and the extent to which funding of these organizations is provided by government bodies.

These topics would be addressed through interviews with relevant respondents, site visits and a series of ‘answerable questions’, which would be distributed beforehand (together with a short briefing paper) to the proposed host organizations. (Further details appear in the Methodology section.)

The Australian Ski Patrol Association (“ASPA”) is a member of FIPS (Fédération Internationale des Patrouilles de Ski)1, an international association of organisations involved with the multi-disciplinary aspects of ski patrolling and ski safety. Through working together with the ASPA VP International Liaison, a number of useful contacts would be sourced for the project. I am also a member of the International Society for Skiing Safety.