One of Canada’s largest motocross events is taking place this week in Walton. Races will be won, trophies will be hoisted, but it will also be a week where some of Walton’s 980 motocross riders will end up at the Seaforth hospital’s emergency room. “We can see everything from small simple cuts and lacerations, right up to some of the more serious traumas, similar to what we were playing with here today,” said Ron Cameron, who has been the on-site medic at Walton TransCan for the last 23 years. Cameron is helping to oversee special “motocross injury” training at the Seaforth hospital, where they see a rise in trauma patients every year during Walton’s TransCan Amateur Grand National Championships, happening this week and weekend. “Especially in an event like this, we could see kids coming in, teenagers coming in. Pediatric patients are always a little bit scarier than adults, because they’re not something that we see all the time,” said Katie Fearns, Clinical Nurse Educator with the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance (HPHA). Unless you’re a motocross rider yourself, just removing a rider’s specialized helmet can seem complicated, let alone trying to remove it during an emergency. “We try to do this yearly actually and just try to come up with a really good, fresh scenario every time, and give the nursing staff the opportunity to practice equipment removal, I.V. start, fluid administration, all the things that they would normally need to know in the moment when those stressful situations are happening,” said HPHA Clinical Nurse Educator, Selina Fleming. While every effort is made to ensure all riders come home from Walton without any injuries, racing can be a high-risk activity. A recent study found that 95 of every 1,000 riders suffers some sort of injury while racing. “Our role is to be the first level of care for any incident that happens at the track, whether it’s major or minor or whatever, and then to get them handed off to the next level of care through EMS and through to the local facilities here in Seaforth and other areas that we operate in,” said Cameron, Founder of Canadian Event Medics. “We are constantly offering ‘mocks’ to all of our staff in every area of clinical practice. But this specific trauma scenario we’re offering right now is just to prepare for this event as it comes, so that our staff are ready and prepared for every event that could happen,” said Fearns. The Walton TransCan Amateur Grand National Championship runs from Aug. 11-16 on the edge of Walton.
