The First Aid Training Unit at HMS Raleigh gives sailors – whatever their branch – the skills to save life in the ‘platinum ten minutes’ after being wounded.

More than a dozen sailors a week are taught crucial life-saving techniques in a unique and bloodily-realistic mock-up ship.

Pictures: Dave Sherfield, HMS Raleigh

YOU can’t hear the monotonous roar of engines, the jarring tone of the klaxon and the rush of gas escaping from smashed pipes, there are screams for help.

But newly-qualified chef AB Lynsey Hellier can – which partly explains her shell-shocked face as she helps a ‘shot’ senior rating as hell comes to HMS Raleigh.

In a unique mock-up of the lower decks of a warship, 17 sailors play victim and rescuer as a week-long first aid training course reaches its climax.

Each week, at least a dozen sailors – from able seamen fresh from training to hoary chiefs the wrong side of 40 – pass through the First Aid Training Unit, or FATU, to improve their medical skills.

Every sailor and Royal Marine is taught the basics of first aid. One in three must undergo the week-long more advanced course – demonstrated here – and one in ten the even-more-thorough instruction.

Of the week-long advanced course, the first three days are spent learning the theory, day four the bloody practice: first in the replica ship, then outside where a Wessex helicopter has crashed on a main road and a Metro and Astra have crashed into the back of it.

A first aider tends to a stoker impaled in a hatch in the mock-up ship compartment

In addition to the mock-ups, there’s fake blood by the bucketful, replica wounds such as a lacerated chest and exposed intestines, and a lot of very bad acting.

“It is a false environment, but turn the lights off, put the smoke generators on, the noise, the cries, it puts you into that world,” explains PO(MA) Craig Hainey, First Aid Training Officer.

And so the 17 students treat the exercise as if it were real. After recovering the casualties from the disaster area, they lay them out and tend to them, making observations every few minutes ready for the professionals to take over.

“It’s quite an intense morning,” said AB Barry McWilliams, a reservist with HMS Hibernia. “I’m more mechanically-minded. I’d really rather see an engine gushing away than a body. You are shown some pretty visceral images during the course.

“The skills taught are incredibly useful. Rather than standing there and watching in panic, you can help out and get stuck in.”

Lacerations, missing limbs and masses of blood – carnage in the cabin of the Wessex

For 19-year-old Lynsey from Bracknell, about to join her first ship HMS Montrose, the training was a bit of shock to the system.

She said: “During basic training you’re told that you’ll learn first aid, but I didn’t expect anything like this – just minor injuries. You tell yourself: ‘this won’t happen to me’. But then you realise: ‘I have to deal with it.’

“The course is really interesting and actually quite enjoyable, but the exercise is disorienting and nerve-racking – apart from the odd visit, I’ve never really been on a ship before.”

Which is why the facility, says PO Hainey, is FATU’s “party piece. It’s heavily used – and incredibly useful.

“The magic or golden hour is crucial for survival, the first ten minutes – ‘the platinum ten’ as we call them – especially. They really make the difference.

“The important thing is giving the right treatment at the right time. If the person standing next to you is first-aid trained, your chances of survival are so much greater.”

See November’s edition of Navy News for an extended feature on the first-aid training.