Not your typical classroom

Through the winter of 2023, with a tiny group of dedicated colleagues, the New Zealand Society for Mountain Medicine organised and ran a six-week elective in mountain and wilderness medicine for 15 medical students in the South Island.

Traditionally electives are chosen to help broaden out medical education. Often favouring international destinations/ alternative healthcare systems, or clinical work in fields which aren’t mainstream, such as Tropical or Dive medicine. Since the pandemic, and until only very recently, Kiwi students have been restricted to electives within our shores. The society saw an opportunity to deliver an exciting ‘local’ elective – and meet a need.

The six-week journey started in Christchurch and the Port Hills, through to Central Otago and back to Canterbury and the Craigieburn Valley. Along the way we accumulated hard outdoor skills – map work and navigation, basic rope skills, avalanche awareness, and mountaineering with crampons and ice axe.

Within this framework we blended guest speakers, clinical simulations, lectures, and interdisciplinary working. For some, with pre-existing experience in the outdoors, it might have been more relaxing than conventional study. For the small faculty, there were times where the rolling nature of the programme in a series of remote locations felt like a lot of work!

And what’s in a name? ‘Austere’. ‘Mountain’. ‘Wilderness’. All prefixes for medical practice that involves providing the best care, usually with limited resources, in a remote or challenging setting. This conjures up images of a doctor in a down jacket at a base camp and some ‘adventure tourists’. But it also includes clinicians involved in all forms of pre-hospital care, on the front lines of disasters and emergencies – something of increasing relevance in these uncertain times (just wait until the next weather event …).

Introducing students to mountain medicine philosophy has intrinsic value. First, it develops insight into the pre-hospital/mountain medicine approach (eg, how to triage). Second, using the mountains as a medium, it teaches highly transferable skills not really taught in formal educational settings – self-reliance, resilience and team-working with allied professionals. Third, it offers a space to acknowledge the proven benefits of the outdoors in self-care – a counter point to our increasingly busy workplaces.