St John Ambulance Australia (NSW) Scout Training Area __________________________________________________________ Scouts Australia — NSW Branch Scouts’ First Aid Team

On this page:

• Our Team teaches First Aid to Scouts and Guides and other volunteers

• South Metropolitan Region (SMR) Classes

• Sydney North Region and Greater Western Sydney Region Classes

• Booking Procedure

• Fees before Family Discounts — 2010 / 2011

Our Team teaches First Aid to Scouts and Guides and other volunteers ...

The Scout Area of St John Ambulance Australia (NSW), also known as the Scouts' First Aid Team, covers the geographical area of three Scouting Regions: Sydney North Region, where it was founded back in the 1990s, Greater Western Sydney Region, and South Metropolitan Region. Our Trainers sometimes go further afield, and have taught First Aid in Tamworth and Wagga Wagga, as well as targeted courses for specific-interest groups, like a Game Fishing Club.

Our reason for being is to teach first aid to Scouts Australia and Guides Australia members and to offer first aid support to their activities. We occasionally receive enquiries from similarly oriented groups of volunteers, and we are happy to accept them into our classes if room remains after the Scouting and Guiding needs have been met.

South Metropolitan Region (SMR) Classes

Bookings for South Metropolitan Region First Aid classes are managed by Michael Turner (telephone 0419 287 457) and David Shaw (telephone 9558 7619, after hours).

Venue for the South Metropolitan Region First Aid classes: Please see the FAQs & Links page.

Sydney North Region and Greater Western Sydney Region Classes

The Secretary of the Scouts' First Aid Team manages the bookings for Sydney North Region and Greater Western Sydney Region classes. (Contact details at the foot of the page.)

The Greater Western Sydney Region members of the Scouts' First Aid Team have said they will provide parallel classes to those at Barra Brui (in Sydney North Region) if a number of candidates from Greater Western Sydney book at a Barra Brui class indicating their interest in attending a class in their own geographical area.

Where is Barra Brui? Please see the FAQs & Links page.

Booking Procedure

Booking for a class involves sending a completed Booking Form and paying the fee for the class. A booking is not considered to be confirmed unless both the booking form and payment have been received. Often our classes are so popular that more people express their interest in joining a class than we can accommodate in one class. When this happens, to be fair to all, those who have confirmed bookings (by having sent both the booking form and the correct payment) have priority for the available places.

If a class is so large that we are considering involving more Trainers and adding a parallel class, we must register this extra class with St John Ambulance at least a fortnight ahead. If the existing bookings are not confirmed with fees paid at that stage, we cannot justify the inconvenience to Trainers and to St John of adding the extra class, and those who have left their confirmations until too late will be disappointed. Administering the bookings in these circumstances becomes stressful because many of you who attend our classes are our friends.

Class-specific booking forms are used, and these are available for download from the various pages of this site dealing with the classes. The forms are in Portable Document Format (PDF), and are each about 33kB in size. For more help on how to read PDF files, please see the FAQs & Links page.

Fees for the various scheduled classes are tabulated below. Family discounts are available when two or more members of the one family from the one address attend a class together. The discounts can be quite substantial when parents attend with their youngsters. Calculating the discounts is quite involved, however, so please contact the Secretary for a quote, preferably by email.

There are special prices for Remote Area First Aid taken in conjunction with a St John Apply First Aid course. See Fees (below).

Member Prices
The member prices on all first aid courses are available to all members of the Scouting and Guiding communities. The parents of all Scouts and Guides in all sections are members of the Group or Unit Committees, and hence members of the Association entitled to the member prices. Similarly, siblings of Scouts and Guides can attend at member rates. Parents and Leaders should avail themselves of the opportunity to gain first aid skills and qualifications at very favourable prices.

In completing your booking form, please be sure to enter an email address if you have one. We are a group of volunteers running a charitable entity and trying to keep time and costs down, so we prefer to do the vast majority of our correspondence by email. Please also show whether you are "at school" or not by ticking the box in the line showing your membership. St John uses this to determine student discounts. Sorry, TAFE or University doesn't count as "at school".

We prefer payment by Cheque or Money Order, payable to "St John Ambulance Australia (NSW)", and sent to the address below.
Please do NOT pay directly to St John Ambulance.

Address: Send the tear-off lower section of the booking form with your payment to:
   First Aid Bookings
   PO Box 341
   MONA VALE  NSW  1660
before the closing date of the class.

The Closing Date
The closing date is three weeks before the class. This is so that the Secretary can assess whether the class is viable. If the numbers are sufficient, we then register the class with St John Ambulance; St John needs at least two weeks' notice. If we have found that a class is not viable at the closing date, and have cancelled the class, we have no way of resurrecting it when a flood of late bookings arrive in the last two weeks, as much as we would like to. Sadly this has happened on a few occasions, so please don't leave booking until the last moment.

If we determine that a course is viable and register it, more bookings from adults may still be accepted after the closing date unless the course is already full. Therefore, if you wish to enrol for a course, it is always worth enquiring even after the official closing date – there may still be room to accommodate you. However, Scouts Australia's rules regarding the Activity Notification Form (A1) preclude us from accepting further bookings from minors after the closing date.

After you have sent a booking, and soon after the closing date, the Secretary will send you an enrolment email. This will confirm your payment status, and give you further details about the class: what to wear, what to bring, how to find the venue, and any other requirements that Scouts Australia has imposed upon us. This will mean completing a Scout Activity Notification Form (A1) (PDF file, 142kB, opens in a new window), and the enrolment email will tell you the entries to make on the form.

When people show an interest in booking for a class, we tentatively enrol them into the class. If they haven't formally enrolled before the enrolment emails are sent, their notices will show a 'Balance Owing'. If these people with tentative enrolments don't contact the Bookings Secretary within three days of receiving the enrolment email, their enrolments may be cancelled. In some circumstances which require us to register an extra class to accommodate the latecomers, the opportunity to do this will have passed, and we simply won't be able to admit into the class these ones who left their payments too late.

Another requirement of Scouts Australia (NSW Branch) concerns classes where there are youth members of different gender to the Leaders present. Scouts insists that we must refuse the booking of a candidate in such a situation. The problem arises most often with Emergency First Aid or Preliminary First Aid (First Aid for Juniors) classes, when we have female Scouts and Guides but the Trainers allocated to the class are both male, as most of our Trainers are. In such cases, we must ask a Leader or parent of the girls attending to come to the class all day as a chaperone. If no chaperone is available, Scouts says we cannot allow the girls to attend.
So we can only accept girls into our classes if a female adult is present.

Substitutions
Substitutions of one candidate for another may be made, but only by arranging them with the Bookings Secretary . Various eligibility considerations apply to the new candidate, and we must adhere to the requirements that Scouts Australia has imposed upon us. Ad hoc substitutions carry the risk that the new candidate will not gain a certificate because of not being entered on the Class Roll or that the new candidate will not even be admitted to the course. Diverting the Trainer's attention at the beginning of the course causes delays and inconvenience to the other candidates as all our courses make full use of the time set down.

Fees before Family Discounts — 2010 / 2011

First Aid Trainers
All of these courses and all St John Ambulance Australia (NSW) courses up to, but not including Occupational First Aid, are free of charge to First Aid Trainers.

* Remote Area First Aid Course Specials :

1  Because Apply First Aid is a prerequisite to attending the Remote Area First Aid course, a full two-day Apply First Aid course and an abbreviated intensive Apply First Aid by e-Learning plus One Day course are scheduled immediately before each Remote Area First Aid course at Barra Brui. We refer to the closely scheduled AP2 (or AP1) and RFA courses as linked. Candidates booking for a linked pair of courses leading to both the Apply First Aid and Remote Area First Aid qualifications are eligible for the 'Special A' discounted Remote Area First Aid course fee.

2  An alternative way to come to the Remote Area First Aid course is with a Apply First Aid qualification gained previously from a St John Ambulance course (which includes the Scouts' First Aid Team's courses), and still current. Candidates who have gained their current Apply First Aid from a Scouts' First Aid Team course or other St John Ambulance course are eligible for the 'Special B' discounted Remote Area First Aid course fee.

3  Please justify your entitlement to the 'Special A' or 'Special B' discounted Remote Area First Aid course fee before the closing date of the course. It is difficult to make changes after the Class Rolls and receipts have been completed.

4  Candidates coming to the Remote Area First Aid course with a current Apply First Aid qualification gained from another provider — not from the Scouts' First Aid Team and not from another St John Ambulance course — pay the normal Remote Area First Aid course fee.

5  Family discounts still apply to all cases. If you consider your case comes into this category, please contact the Bookings Secretary by email or telephone.

^# Apply First Aid Course Fees :

It may seem curious that the course fees for the two-day full Apply First Aid course and the one-day Recertification and e-Learning courses (AP1) are the same. However the cost of the course is based on the materials used, part of the cost of course development, the cost of issuing the certificates, and a small subsidy towards the cost of St John Ambulance's volunteer services. Scouters teach the courses as volunteers, so there is no labour or other time-based component.

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Page design last updated:  Wednesday 30 November 2011 20:00