Keith Conover, M.D., FACEP, Medical Director
36 Robinhood Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15220-3014
412-561-3413 kconover+@pitt.edu
Choosing a Wilderness Medical Kit: The Basics
Choosing the contents of a wilderness medical or first aid kit is hard. But if you are putting together such a kit, you may look to this document for help. The Wilderness EMS Institute staff and contributors put a lot of effort into this document. One of our missions is wilderness medical education, so we are making the list public, but also showing how we decided on the list. The list might not be exactly what you need for your medical kit. But we hope you find this document, with all of its principles and explanatory notes, a good starting place for designing your own kit. If designing a large team kit, you may want to look at the WEMSI Team Medical Kit document, available at http://www.wemsi.org.
As we said, assembling a medical kit is hard. But there are many ways to make it easier. You can simply get a list from someone authoritative and assemble a kit based on that. But it may make more sense for you to ask certain basic questions, and then assemble a kit based on the answers.