MedWAR How-To Guide

What is a MedWAR?

A Medical Wilderness Adventure Race (MedWAR) is an adventure race competition that tests wilderness and emergency medicine techniques with unique scenarios and events. 

First steps to start planning a MedWAR

1. Decide who your target group is – with scheduling it may be easiest to promote the event mostly to first and second year students.

2. Pick a date – a Saturday or Sunday morning in the spring would likely work best.

   • Gives plenty of time for promotion/planning of the event

   • Allows first year students to get acclimated so they are more likely to participate in extracurricular events

   • Check local events and holidays to make sure there are no major conflicts

3. Pick a location – a nearby park (state or local) that is large enough to spread out scenarios is recommended.

   • • Reach out to park employees to find out if this event is allowed, if a use permit or special event permit is needed, etc.

     • May potentially need event insurance (eventsured.com is an easy service to use)

4. Reach out for help early – share your plans with emergency medicine residents, faculty and attendings to see if you can get assistance with planning or secure volunteers down the line.

After you’ve set a date/location, what’s next?

• Decide how many stations you want to have and plan a map of the course. 

• Gauge expectations from interested students.

• For the first year of an event, it may be best to plan for a half-day event with shorter distances between scenarios. Example: for the first year of my event, we had 7 scenarios with no more than a ~20 minute walk between stations so any students could be confident participating

• If your students are more active or looking for a more involved event you can adjust accordingly and have participants run between stations, involve additional obstacles, etc. 

• There are different options as to how to structure your map and time the race. You can make a circular numbered course where all teams have to go in a specific order.

  • • Pros: decreases potential of overlap at stations, easy to keep track of teams’ locations

    • Cons: easier

    • How to time on this map: have the proctor at each station use a stopwatch to time the time spent on the scenario, travel time is not scored

• You can make a random course and allow teams to go “free for all”

  • • Pros: more complicated, students have to use judgement on how to complete course

    • Cons: allows for potential overlap at stations, may lose track of teams

    • How to time on this map: release all teams at the same time and only total time to completion of the competition is scored

How to write scenarios

• Start with a list of what scenarios/learning goals you’re most interested in including and narrow down from there (a list of potential scenarios is  attached at the end of this page). Try not to overlap learning goals too much.

• Use different online resources to help write scenarios and adjust as needed to a medical student level. Remember students should not know everything! If they did the competition would be a tie. Recommended case study resources to use: wildmed, NOLS

• Have a standardized rubric and add specifics to each scenario as needed (examples attached). Decide how many points should be awarded for each line, gauge based on importance to the scenario.

• Make a list of necessary supplies for each station

Final Steps

How to get supplies

• See if your hospital has a wilderness medicine elective that you can borrow supplies from. If not, reach out to your EM residency program to try to get assistance with acquiring supplies. Plan to purchase some basic supplies – basic wound care/ACE wraps/etc., ropes, tarps, splitting materials

How to get volunteers

• Try to get M3s, M4s, and residents to proctor each station. They don’t need to have wilderness medicine knowledge because it’s relatively easy to teach each individual their scenario and the grading sheets should be thorough so there aren’t too many questions.

• Reach out to people early. They won’t have their schedules yet, so try and just get a long list of people who can potentially volunteer. It’s helpful to make a virtual flyer to send to a resident and they can send it to all their co-residents

• Ask additional students, premed undergrads, or friends to volunteer as SPs (I reached out to the undergrad premed fraternity PhiDE to get volunteers).

How to secure funding

• Plan to fundraise if you need money for the event. Easiest option is to sell sweatshirts or T-shirts at your school – best to do a basic design for your school, not WMIG related, to get the most purchases. 

• Send out a sign-up for teams. It may be easiest to have one team member sign up their team on a google form and have the form automatically close when you have your desired number of teams. Remember to do plenty of promo in emails, newsletters, class group chats, etc. 

• Prepare the teams for the event. Most students will have no wilderness medicine knowledge! Hold a WMIG meeting to teach some basic techniques and give tips.

• Decide if you want prizes, merch, etc. Our group had REI gift cards for all team members of the winning team and had custom MedWAR stickers for all the participants.

More MEDwar resources

See an example MedWAR scenario here and an example scenario rubric here.

See example learning goals for MedWAR scenarios here.