Scottish Mountain Rescue National Training Conference

Scottish Mountain Rescue National Training Conference

On the weekend of 28th to 30th October we held our first National Training Conference since 2019, having had to pause for the two years during the pandemic. We held the event at Glenmore Lodge.

Over 120 volunteer team members attended the event from across Scotland.

Attendees were able to choose from a huge list of workshops including rigging (ropework for rescues), wellbeing, human factors and how they affect decision making, fundraising for Mountain Rescue Teams, media training, search management and digital mapping, radios, water awareness, medical, avalanche, 4 x 4 winching, incident management, running a charity, social media for teams and diversity.

The event also included two speakers. Donnie Campbell kicked off the conference on the Friday night with a discussion of his record breaking Munro Round which he did in August 2020. Anna Taylor spoke at the dinner on the Saturday night sharing her inspirational adventures.

We also had a wide range of exhibitors from different outdoor brands who came from all parts of the UK to be at our National Training Conference. It allowed our attendees to engage and see first-hand the support they give to Mountain Rescue in Scotland.

The National Training Programme including the National Training Conference helps to ensure that teams have all the knowledge and skills that they need, and allows us to share good practice between teams.

Scottish Mountain Rescue courses are designed by small technical sub groups, delivered by a wide variety of team members and shaped through feedback by course participants. Information delivered on our courses is supported by the good governance of broad research and knowledge and by inviting external experts to our courses and engaging in international exchanges. All our course designers look outward to best practice from around the world, as well as looking inward to what’s going on in Scotland and the UK.

SMR training has a massively positive impact on all teams across Scotland. The National Training Conference is an important way for us to bring together our teams.

Here is what our attendees said:

“Thank you to all the SMR team and instructors for organising a fantastic useful weekend. It was brilliant to meet and catch-up with people in other teams and the wider MR family.”

“The workshops were an invaluable opportunity to learn about things which interest me but were out with my normal training syllabus.”

“Thank you all for providing us all with a stimulating, well organised, flexible, innovative conference style.”

We asked all of our conference attendees to give us three words to describe the conference and below is the word cloud we made with the results.