Turkish delegation pulls out of MDA Olympics

by Dan Slobodkin

Turkey’s five-man delegation withdrew from this year’s annual Magen David Adom Paramedics Competition, where 50 teams from around the world vied for the title of the “Very Best Rescue Team.”

The Turkish delegation “decided to cancel for their own reasons and MDA is very sad at their decision,” said a Magen David Adom spokesman.

The teams confronted challenges such as rescuing a paratrooper caught in a treetop, administering first aid to a woman in advanced labor and treating wounded “victims” in a cowshed. During the three-day competition, they had to demonstrate their professional life-saving capabilities, treating eleven different categories of injuries.

Most were fairly routine, the type of situations a typical EMS team anywhere in the world encounters on a day-to-day basis, such as treating a severe bee-sting reaction.

In other scenarios, the paramedics had to change a flat tire at top speed because someone’s life is on the line, and treat the victim of a failed suicide attempt.

For the foreign teams, it was an opportunity to practice skills needed in handling mass-casualty events, an area Israel excels in after years of wars and terror.

Recently, an IDF medical team was dispatched to Port-au-Prince, Haiti to assist with the calamitous aftermath of the earthquake. There they operated a field hospital together with the Norwegian Red Cross.

Six months earlier dozens of MDA medics traveled to Jordan to treat and evacuate Israeli tourists wounded in a bus accident.

This year’s competition drew 20 foreign delegations, including medical teams from Jordan, China and Panama – all of which have very close working links with Israel’s national rescue organization. Medical teams from various IDF units also took part in the competition.

Participating teams went through two rounds of testing – each comprised of five situations – in addition to a special nighttime exercise, during which they had to confront an unexpected situation that required ingenuity in finding solutions to emergency situations under difficult field conditions.

The competition was held at various sites, including Mount Gilboa, the Carmel Forests, Haifa – and even a cowshed in the Carmel Region.

Carmel District paramedics dominated the competition, taking first place in both the white ambulance and intensive-care ambulance categories. Among foreign teams, Spain won the white ambulance category, while Canada took first place in the intensive-care ambulance category.

Credit: Asi Dvilansky

To prepare for the competition, MDA set up a massive emergency complex at Kibbutz Nir Etzion, equipped with an operations dispatch-center activated by advanced communications systems with high-speed internet connectivity (ADSL, WiFi).

Purchased by Friends Societies of MDA at the request of MDA’s Director General, the complex is to play a pivotal role in MDA’s readiness to respond to emergency situations such as earthquakes and multiple-casualty incidents. The MDA Olympics used it during the competition to test its full operational capacity.

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Tags: Magen David Adom, MDA Olympics, paramedics